News) Starvation deaths & Farmer suicides loom over Bundelkhand
Submitted by guru on Tue, 2011-05-17 11:18 
Another summer of crop failure, water crisis, starvation deaths and suicides looms over Bundelkhand, a parched region espoused by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Just 10 days ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Gandhi scion had addressed a rally at Banda and announced sops, including a Rs 200- crore drinking water scheme, for the region.
Courtesy: Indiatoday.intoday.in
Another summer of crop failure, water crisis, starvation deaths and suicides looms over Bundelkhand, a parched region espoused by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.Just 10 days ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Gandhi scion had addressed a rally at Banda and announced sops, including a Rs 200- crore drinking water scheme, for the region.
But the over 10,000 villages in the politically important zone of Uttar Pradesh present a very grim picture with the rise in temperature. The situation is not better even in those villages where development has been ostensibly better.
Take the case of Banda's Goira Mugli, the village of state rural development minister Daddu Prasad. There are 400 handpumps and 10 wells for a population of 10,000. But still the people here don't have water to drink, let alone for irrigation. While wells have dried up, 250 handpumps are not working. One can draw only one bucket of water from each of the remaining 150 handpumps.
"The water table has gone down. Last summer, we used to draw two buckets of water in 10 minutes. We fear that next summer there would be no water at all in these pumps," Kallu, a villager, said. "I don't remember the last time when I drank more than five glasses of water in a day," Naeem Khan (40), another villager, said.
The UPA government had approved a Rs 7,266- crore package for the region in 2009 and also additional grants of Rs 1,800 crore in the last two fiscals for UP and MP - the two states under which Bundelkhand falls. However, these measures seem to have yielded little success in alleviating the problems.
Read more..Courtesy: Indiatoday.intoday.in
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