Bid For Mahadayi

Should Karnataka divert the Mahadayi's water to end the water crisis in its three districts?

- Nidhi Jamwal

AN EERIE silence greets visitors to Yamanur village of Dharwad district in North Karnataka. A group of old men are huddled together at a chaupal and slightly ahead, in a by-lane, old women sit together, weeping.

In July, a massive police crackdown took place in this village of 580 households in Navalgund taluka. Old women and men, pregnant women and young children were brutally beaten up. Many women were verbally abused and physically harmed. “I was hit with the laathi on body parts I cannot show,” says Kashava Nagappa Chulki, a 55-year-old woman. “I locked the main door of my house as I was with my grandsons—aged six and five—but the policemen pushed it open and started hitting me with their boots and laathis. My grandsons are still in shock and cannot sleep in the night,” Chulki adds.

Like Chulki, many others from her taluka, who have been demanding water for the past one year, faced laathis on July 28 and 29. “There is no water for irrigation. The monsoon has played truant for the last three years, and this summer we faced the worst ever drought,” complains Aasif Yalegar, president of the panchayat samiti of Yamanur, where 80 per cent residents are farmers.