Dam Project in Deep Water

Among the first to fall was the Rs 95-lakh dam built at Chief Minister Babulal Marandi’s hometown Kodaibank, which survived for exactly 11 days after its inauguration on June 22. Many villagers, including Marandi’s father, lost their paddy crops.

The latest incident happened in Kanke village, where a dam estimated to cost Rs 15 lakh and started on March 8 got washed away on September 14. Now all that stands in its place are ruins. ‘‘We play hide and seek here,’’ says Chakra Mahato, standing in the middle of the broken walls.

The dam was meant to enable 500-odd people of Kanke block in Ranchi district, including Chakra’s parents, to reap more than one crop a year. Chakra’s parents, who own two-three acres of cultivable land, were hoping the dam would ensure that they didn’t have to migrate, like many others in their village have done, to Kanpur for a living. The night the dam fell, their dream crashed.

They aren’t the only ones mourning. In the backward state of Jharkhand, 71 per cent of the 2.18 crore people are dependent on agriculture for survival. Farming is practised in 22.68 per cent of the land area, of which the irrigated area is less than 2 per cent, despite the fact that the state has innumerable rivers and streams and gets plenty of rain.

That is why the Gram Bhagirathi Project. ‘‘Under this project, it has been decided to build ponds and check dams in every village,’’ Governor Vinod Chandra Pandey had declared in his speech delivered on the floor of the Assembly on February 15. In 212 blocks of the state, 9,735 sites were identified for construction of the water points at a cost of Rs 650 crore during the current financial year.

But what began at Kodaibank continued in other parts of the state as three more dams built under the project collapsed during July-August. They were coming up at a cost varying between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 11 lakh at Barorwa village in Palamau and Futanwanallah and Huntergunj blocks in Chatra district.

Asked if Namdhari’s perception about why the dams were collapsing was correct, WRD Minister Ramchandra Kesri says he had no knowledge about it.

Chief Secretary G. Krishnan adds: ‘‘We have decided to employ an independent agency to study the impact of the government-sponsored development scheme. By doing this, we will have data on the utility of the project. It will also prevent dams getting washed away in the future.’’

Chakra Mahato’s grandfather, 60-year-old Naresh, finds that hard to believe. ‘‘Chakra’s parents had hoped the dam would be completed soon and so they had even planned to undertake cultivation of wheat and potato during winter,’’ he says. ‘‘But their dream was shattered, and they too have left for Kanpur.’’

A few metres away from his hut in Kanke lives Bhola Nath, a mason employed by the contractor to build the dam over river Jumar. He says: ‘‘Its site was selected and the dam built without taking into account the level of water and its current during the peak of monsoon. Moreover, the construction material did not contain iron at all.’’

But there is another person whose word will probably count more with the Chief Minister. His father Chotu Marandi of Kodaibank, who was among those who lost his crop to a dam collapse. According to Chotu, ‘‘In place of mixing one bag of cement with four bags of sand, the contractor preferred to mix one bag of cement with seven bags of sand. This made the structure so weak that it could not withstand the first spell of monsoon rains.’’