UP Elections 2017: Cry for clean water ​continues to ​echo in ​this village

Elections come and go, candidates keep up the poll banter time after time, but for the Kashyaps of Gogwan village​,​ the quest for potable water continues endlessly. Courted by all, the community has voted in favour of one party, then another in the hope that they will one day drink clean water. But all they have encountered is a mirage.

A narrow alley inside Shamli district’s Gogwan village leads to the home of Ramniwas Kashyap. Two years ago, engineers from the state’s Jal Nigam board declared that the water extracted from the hand pump installed outside Ramniwas’ home was “unpotable”, or not worth drinking.
 
Engineers arrived in Gogwan to draw samples from 10 government installed hand pumps after the villagers raised a hue and cry. Two were declared “unpotable” – the colour of the water was yellow, hardness in one of the two samples exceeded the threshold of 600 mg per litre (mg/L) and touched up to 646 mg/L and iron content was a high 1.2 mg/L against the desired 0.3 mg/L.
 
Both hand pumps belonged to families from the OBC (other backward classes) Kashyap community, perceived to be lower caste and a minority in the village dominated by Muslim. Most of them are traditional voters of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) but have been courted by both the SP and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose Hukum Singh represented the Kairana constituency in which Gogwan falls before he became MP and SP’s Nahid Hasan won in his stead.
 
With a population of 12,000, Gogwan is one of the largest villages in Shamli and has barely 25 to 30 Hindu families, mostly Kashyaps who are either landless or own very little land. Most families are Muslim landowners who cultivate sugarcane and wheat.
 
The demographic polarisation, it seems, has spilt over to the key issue of clean water. Despite the lab report, accessed by DNA, declaring water from these hand pumps unfit for consumption, they have not been painted red by the administration.
 
The result, Ramniwas (60) and his family of five continue to drink water from the hand pump.

MLA comes calling

As another voting day approached, SP legislator Nahid Hasan visited Gogwan. It was about 7 p.m. and Ramniwas’ 15-year-old daughter Sonia was filling a bucket from the hand pump for her evening chores. A few months ago, Ramniwas’ wife Bebo had fallen critically ill and he had to sell off his only piece of land, one 'bigha,' which is 0.25 acres, to cover her treatment costs. “Kya karein? Majboori hai (What do we do? We are compelled by circumstances),” he muttered slowly.
 
“Doctors were treating her for stones in the abdominal area. I spent all the Rs.1 lakh I got on her treatment but she’s no better,” he said.
 
Meanwhile, loudspeakers announcing the arrival of Hasan got louder. Ramniwas did not directly blame the politician or the contaminated water his family is forced to drink for his plight.
​ ​But his neighbour Mursaleen Khan did not mince his words. “In the past two years, Hasan has done nothing to correct the condition. He does not care. He has encouraged corruption and criminal activities in the village instead,” he alleged.
 
Despite repeated attempts, Hassan remained unavailable for a comment. 
 
Like Ramniwas, Karasan Kashyap (65) and his family also continue to drink contaminated water from the pump outside their home.
 
“Those who can afford to install submersible pumps have done so in their homes. Most are land-rich Muslim farmers. These pumps that go deep under ground up to 250 feet are giving better quality water. The installation costs close to Rs
​ ​40,000. Where are we going to get that kind of money from?” he asked.
 
“The engineers gave us a written report citing that water from two hand pumps is ‘unpotable’. They have done nothing to better our situation, I work for nearly 12 hours a day in fields or in brick kilns, at construction sites and barely make Rs
​ ​200-250 a day. Our neighbours do not allow us to fetch water from their houses. They have a strict ‘purdah,’ system. They do not let us enter their homes,” he said.
 
“We had voted for the SP candidate Nahid Hassan two years ago in the by-elections thinking he would do something. This time around we are backing BJP,” he added.

The land question

It’s a complicated situation, the farmers say.
 
Over the past five years, the sugarcane yield in Gogwan and adjoining villages of Western Uttar Pradesh has shot up from 150 quintals an acre to 350 quintals an acre. Villagers credit increased yield to usage of pesticides. “We are happy with high yields. It fetches us more money. But we suspect it may be affecting the quality of ground water extracted from hand pumps,” said Mursaleen Khan.