Coimbatore: Coimbatore gets it’s drinking water supply primarily from the Siruvani dam and the Pillur Dam projects. The rapidly increasing population and housing infrastructure has made the water supply strained for the industrial city. Thus plans are afoot to execute a third drinking water project from the Bhavani river - Pillur III water augmentation project.
Coimbatore: Coimbatore gets it’s drinking water supply primarily from the Siruvani and the Pillur Dam projects. The rapidly increasing population and housing infrastructure has made the water supply strained for the industrial city. Thus plans are afoot to execute a third drinking water project from the Bhavani river - Pillur III water augmentation project.
While the intent for the project has no opposition, the execution plan that is in place for the project has faced stiff opposition from the farmers in the Mettupalayam area. The government had planned to execute this infrastructure project using the Corporation of Coimbatore. The plan consists of setting up a water pumping station in the Thekkampatti and pump the water through pipes for a distance of 50km across various farmlands to Coimbatore.
Farmers oppose this plan vehemently stating that this plan will not only affect the farming of that area but also be detrimental to the already implemented water schemes. The farmers have insisted that the government drop this plan and use tanks system to take the water to Coimbatore.
A farmers’ review meet was organised in K. Pungampalayam to discuss about this scheme by Tamilnadu Farmer’s Association. The meeting was headed by Rangaswamy, the State President of the Tamilnadu Farmer’s Association. In this meeting it was discussed that “the government has decided to implement the third drinking water project for Coimbatore by taking the water from the Mettupalayam Bhavani river. This project has been kicked off even when the previous project from the same river has not yielded enough water. This has been done in the intent of sacrificing the farmer’s livelihood. This project has been kicked off taking into consideration the population increase in the city of Coimbatore for the next 50 years and because of this there is a serious possibility of Bhavani River losing it’s water capacity for other needs. This sucking of water to Coimbatore will have dire consequences to the nearby farmlands.
Already farmers are protesting against the setting up of transformers and electricity transmitter towers in farmlands and the farmers have been left home and dry with adequate compensations not reaching them. The farmers in Mettupalayam and Coimbatore region have enormous issues to face already. They work under immense pressure due to water scarcity, man animal conflict, crop damage by wild animals and 100-day employment generation schemes like MNREGA. So the government should take all this into account and not make the farmers suffer even more by planning to construct the water pipes in farmlands. They should instead focus on setting up road side tanks through which water can be transported to Coimbatore and this is the method that has been used in our neighbouring states”.
This farmer-government conflict, if we can call it has increased ever more in the last decade due to the increased infrastructure requirements and also lack of sustainable plans from the government. Right now, it seems that for every project the government aims to implement, it’s the farmland that has to be sacrificed. Lack of immediate and adequate compensation makes this situation only worse.