The Ambalur Palar Groundwater Resources Protection Committee has protested against the continued exploitation by municipalities and village panchayats of the groundwater resources in the Palar close to the villages. This had turned the villages into a veritable desert.
A group of farmers from Ambalur, Kodayanji, Ramanaickanpettai, Avaranguppam, Eklaspuram and Vadakkupattu comprising Jamuna Thiagarajan, correspondent of the Ambalur Karia Gounder Vidhyashram, Maheswari, president of Ambalur panchayat and Padma, vice-president of the panchayat, representing the committee met the Collector, S.Gopalakrishnan here on Wednesday and submitted a memorandum to him, urging the government to constitute an experts' committee to study the problems of the villages near the Palar bed and take steps to resuscitate the river which has gone dry, primarily due to drought, and due to over-exploitation of its groundwater resources by the municipal and panchayat bodies including Tirupattur, Vaniyambadi and Ambur municipalities.
The above villages were agriculturally prosperous about 40 years ago, when the Tirupattur municipality first dug a well in the Palar river, constructed a pump house on the river and extracted the groundwater resources from the river for supply to its residents. This was followed by similar attempts by other municipalities and industrial houses, which gradually led to the over-exploitation of the underground water resources and the drying up of the aquifers, which fed the agricultural lands for several centuries.
Ms.Jamuna Thiagarajan told The Hindu that the continued drought on account of the failure of the monsoon for the last four years has compounded the problem, leading to a virtual water crisis in the above villages, affecting the lives of nearly one lakh people in about 30-40 villages starting from the point where the Palar entered Vellore district up to Vaniyambadi. Under these circumstances, the villagers protested against the recent move by the Jolarpet Third grade municipality to deepen its borewell in the Palar river.The Hindu
