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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jan 27, 2014 3:46:00 GMT 5.5
I wanted to write about disappearing water sources and the portable water supply scheme in Kakching, but without data I cannot say anything substantial about this. Somebody among us who is at home should write about this—I’d earnestly ask tamo Surjit Kshetrimayum to see if he can find some time to do something about this. That said, it would have some merit to start a thread for this topic with what I can say about this without being that substantial. At some point in Kakching’s past the Sekmai (=Sekmai Turel) must have proved so seriously inadequate to the civilization, Kakching, it had made possible in its valley that some 700 years ago[1] the people of its valley (I enjoy calling the valley Kakching is settling the Sekmai river valley) dug the kilometers long irrigation canal from what’s now known as Ithai Maru through the town to (I think) the Sekmai turel and the Irum turel. (I don't exactly know what the two branches of the canal empty into.)
The canal is a large single vein until Naodam Bazar (Keithel Macha) where it bifurcates into two, one running west feeding Makha Leikai, Mayai Leikai, and Ningthou Leikai, and the other running north-south feeding Pat Leikai, part of Ningthou Leikai, part of Paji Leikai, Khunyai Leikai, nearly the whole of Wairi, and even Irengband and Mairenbam. The water is channelized to every loukol and leirak throughout the Kakching valley via the capillaries forming a complex network. This water network follows the pattern of Kakching’s settlement plan, which is the most intelligent in Manipur. It’s interesting here to note that the town’s settlement was planned quite before the cities of Berlin, Paris, London and Rome (the most advanced European cities in the world then) came to recognize the difficulty of supplying water to every household as a problem in the middle of the Middle Age.
The smaller, capillary canals supplied the required water to every agricultural field, and filled ponds in every leirak. Some 50 years ago most households in Kakching had a pond at their thongan, which even long after the establishment of the Kakching Water Supply scheme at the foot of Uyok Ching was the source of household water, including for drinking. Now, with the size of population having increased most of the household ponds (they were so closely associated with the daily lives of the people that they once formed part of the community’s culture) which retained water throughout the year have disappeared, and the few remaining are dying out.
As a result, every household in Kakching has long begun to experience household water scarcity, while irrigation has proved constantly sustainable. The disappearance of ponds is not quite a problem with regard to drinking water, because with increased health-consciousness, (most if not all of) the people have stopped drinking untreated water; however, as the water supply scheme of the town has been a complete failure for nearly two decades now, drinking water scarcity has become a problem.
In the 1980s and the early 1990s, in the heyday of the water supply scheme we saw portable water supplied to every leirak through pipes. Then something went wrong and the pipes ran dry, and in the late 1990s what I think are the plant’s water tankers emerged and began to supply water in the leiraks. After some time these tankers disappeared, never to reappear. Then in the early 2000s, some clever individuals who owned Maruti vans made it a business to supply water for a high charge per 20 liter (?), but as not every household didn’t/doesn’t have a van, and as they can/could not do without drinking water, they reluctantly became the regular customers of the smart water guys (yes, it was/is none of these smart guy’s fault; rather in the prevailing situation they are/were the saviors). These water guys fetch(ed) water from the water scheme’s treated water pool. I don’t know how this business is run—they must surely be buying the water, but how they make the payment and to whom, that I don’t know—but I suspect something wrong in this business. The water plant is a state property, run by state money, the water pumped from the Sekmai River being treated by state money, but no return must be going to the state coffer because the people are buying from the water guys who must be buying their merchandise at a cheap price unofficially from some self-seeking officials in the water scheme. This is a vicious circle for the scheme and for the people.
As far as I can understand, Kakching water supply scheme requires a major overhaul. If the seating MLA of the constituency does something the first necessary heave can be given to the rooted ruins. Kakching is a strong community, and it will be able to afford their own water requirement. The scheme should be resurrected, brought on the track again, and its functioning should be monitored by the appropriate authority. The people also should pay for the water—water tax should be strictly enforced. If they don’t pay the scheme cannot operate, and nobody is going to give them free water. There is no free lunch. We encourage a series of ills when we do something wrong as buying water illegally. It in some way or the other hits out back at us, and that we don’t like. Moreover, it’s cheaper and safe to buy from our own government who gives (at least in principle) the money we pay back to us in the form of investments for our own welfare. We cannot correct everything at once. We should start somewhere, with something. If we don’t start, nothing happens on its own. [1]. Dr. Pukhrambam Rajendra Singh argues that Kakching's settlement as we know now was planned in the fourth century CE, and the canal from Ithai Maru was dug soon after that.
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Post by Dr. Lalit Pukhrambam on Jan 27, 2014 5:44:00 GMT 5.5
Yes, electricity, water, and road are very important for any community. Kakching can begin to take care of its won water supply problem if the MLA and KMC are taking a keen interest. Awareness programs can be conducted for the public through library and information center or other organizations. Prepaid system is the best model for Manipur and Kakching, just as nobody complains about prepaid cell phone SIM cards. Why then when it comes to our own local service, we do not want to pay - we expect free service. You do not expect free bottle water from a store. In the US, we have water supply which covers a large area and customers, so they get enough money to operate water supply regularly. Each household has a water meter just like electric meter, and it is monitored distally. They bill us on a 3 monthy basis at the rate of about @150 depending on the usage. In general, summer months have more payment (amount) since we consume more water to water plants, flowers, lawn grass, and vegetables. Running water is always available inside the house. Except when there is a pipe burst due to freezing in winter or other form of damage, then it is cut off for a few hours or a day for repairing. Always, there is a boiling water notice if there is low pressure and pipe leakage or not to drink until further notice after testing.. I am sure in other parts of India in New Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta, Bombay, Ahmedabad, etc., there are not many days of water supply disruption or cut off. Bangalore may be difficult now because of the dispute in Kaveri river with Tamil Nadu as I had some experience in the old days. (Now Bangalore also uses Water Tankers to deliver private supply as well, I heard from my friend there).
Kakching leikais have now fewer Pukhris than was before, and people are not taking care of them as much as it used to be. The one Pukhri at Yumbimcha High School was one of the best Pukhris at Kakching as I remember. The local club takes care of it very well during the dry season in February-March. They pump in water from the Ithei Khong nearby. I am not sure of the current status.
Clean water is really important for a community since it can be borne out and spread several diseases if they are contaminated and if not treated adequately. How the local market area and leikai hotels are getting their water, I do not know. That has to be a concern also, if they are using it directly from the river or ponds without treatment. Washing the utensils, glasses and plates in the hotel in Manipur is a concern overall, especially at Imphal.
ThoiThoi keep posting, a really good one.
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Post by Kunjo Naorem on Feb 10, 2014 18:37:10 GMT 5.5
Such type of business is running succesfully in Kakching also. How to solve it? No one is intended to write about it in dailies. We don't expose such type of activities (unwanted). Lets expose it through newspapers.
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Post by Ajit Naorem on Feb 12, 2014 9:58:39 GMT 5.5
Water is so precious to us. The cost of 1 letter bottle is Rs. 15/-. The demand of pure drinking and usable water is increased day by day. Our main source of water is from ponds, hand pump, tape water, Buying from Water tankers and rain water during rainy season. Yes, our forefathers well planned to get water from Sakmai River. They dug irrigation cannels and its tributaries to get water from the length and breadth of Kakching. We are proud of their skill and state-of-art architecture of town planning. But as population increases day by day and rapid construction of houses our ponds are disappeared and remaining ponds are highly polluted.
Some years back tape water was available once or twice in a week at some areas of Kakching. But there was a lot of complains of pipe leaking about every 100 m distance, containing of tadpoles of frog, weeds etc. and running contaminated water from the drainage. Nowadays water supply is totally failed at Kakching. Helplessly people are buying water from the water tankers @ Rs. 300/-per 1000lts. for drinking and other purposes. About hand pump is concerned, due to contain of Arsenic above the WHO recommended level and possibility of containing Fluoride, lead, Mercury etc. people are giving up using hand pump water for drinking purpose. So, availability of pure water is a big problem. A strong commitment and political will is needed to solve this problem. Our political leaders, KMC should not wait peoples’ movement. To get pure drinking water is our right. It is high time to aware “Water is so precious”. We should use water in reasonable ways. Wastage of water is against the people of Kakching. [/font][/font]
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Feb 14, 2014 2:43:35 GMT 5.5
There is no question and possibility at the moment of water privatization in India, or at least in Manipur. However, it would be relevant to know that water privatization is an international phenomenon, occurring is such disparate places as England, China, Argentina, the Philippines and South Africa, and involving global institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations (McDonald & Ruiters, 2005, p. 1). There are advocates both for and against privatization, and they have their arguments. All types of ownership, be it public, private, or public-private, have their merits and demerits.
The arguments for privatization are that governments are corrupt, unaccountable, unimaginative and financially strapped, and unable to expand and upgrade water services on their own in a reliable and cost-effective manner. The private sector and its operating principles, they argue, must be a central component of water delivery strategies.
At the same time, the opponents of privatization argue that private companies are only interested in the bottom line, charging the poor more than they can afford to pay (and cutting them off when they cannot pay), laying off workers or paying them less for the same work, cutting corners to save costs, creating health and safety risks for the public, and ‘redlining’ some low income communities altogether. Private companies are also quite often found to use bribes and corruption to obtain contracts, or simply ‘low-ball’ bids to get their foot in the door and then rapidly raise rates once entrenched.
These arguments do apply not just to water supply, but to every business. Yes, privatization is demanding, and it seems that not every market society/community is inherently ready for privatization—for privatization to be there, there should be certain level of development in that society as an essential prerequisite. If our government fails in the delivery of every vital service, there will surely reasonably be some in the society who feel like trying out an alternative. We even can remember the proposal some time ago of the privatization of the state's power/electricity sector.
However, not as a matter of readiness or otherwise, it’s worth trying if we can get our government to its feet. If our government delivers the service well, then it’s far better to pay to our government for the service. But we should know that if we do not pay for the services and things (be it water or electricity—whatever) the agent (government) will not have funds to run. So we should stop expecting things for free.
People of Kakching have not done anything collectively when they have had the water issue for about two decades. They should do something soon in this regard—the government will hear.
Reference McDonald, D. A., & Ruiters, G. (2005). Introduction: From Public to Private (to Public Again?). In D. A. McDonald, & G. Ruiters (Eds.), The Age of Commodity: Water Privatization in South Africa (p. 314). New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 17, 2014 3:41:54 GMT 5.5
View Attachment A woman from Kakching Chumnang Leikai carrying drinking water from a long distance. At Kakching there are lot of lower class families who could n’t buy water from private water tankers. Middle and upper class families are buying water even if they have alternative means of getting water. The mindset of such people has show off or status symbol as they are doing. We need to change this mindset.Please refer to this post on the thread Water Purifier in every Kakching Locality. Kakching people are famous in Manipur for their "unity". However, as far as I know, this "unity" is not so straightforward. I will trace the genealogy of this shared feeling among the people of Kakching briefly here.
The place what is called Manipur now was not a place of single, uniform people but was divided into several infighting principalities. The principalities came to be known as salais/clans at a later point in history after the subjugation of the rest of the principalities (the conquered principalities) and their people under the conqueror, the Ninthoujas (or Meiteis) under Pakhangba's leadership, and it was the puyas, I suspect, written after the subjugation, that did popularize these principalities as salais/clans for political reasons, i.e. to consolidate the subjugation as unification with Ningthouja/Meitei superiority. Many puyas (they are more mythical than historical, and hence I don't want to rely solely on their more often than not irrational claims), I suspect to render the unification (under the Ningthouja/Meitei dominance) a hue of divine will, claim the descent of these salais/clans from one single lai, god (Laishram, 2009, p.361).
However, not all puyas deal with the spiritual (only a few do that)--of the 586 puyas listed in A Catalogue of Manipuri Manuscripts (Singh, 1984; see also Laishram, 2009, p.122) only 72 are on religious philosophy. Religion and philosophy, though related, are different things, and it cannot be reasonably said that all the 72 puyas deal with the spiritual. Forty-eight of the puyas are on administration, which is political, and 42 on yek-salais/clans. It won't be too far to draw a line of connection between the obviously political writings with those on yek-salais, considering their conscious unificatory undertones. My contention in this is that these principalities, before their subjugation by the Ningthoujas as the Meiteis thereby all of the distinct groups in this united people being relegated to salais/clans of the united Meitei community, were not related by blood at any near past as the puyas maintain (but in that sense, it all depends on where you cut the link to see or not to see any people on the earth's surface as related to any other people). As we all know they all fought against each other. No two people from the principalities did meet without fighting lick cocks. The number and the geographical boundaries of these principalities fluctuated across time--sometimes it was nine, sometimes eight, sometimes seven, sometimes 11, and then seven, as we have it now.
The Meiteis/Ningthoujas (the Imphal people of the time) fought with the Heirem Khunjans and the Khumans, of which Kakching was part. Though the Heirem Khunjans were fiercer, the Meiteis were stronger because they had more soldiers and their settlement positioned them more strategically, and thus the latter finally subjugated the former. However, the animosity the Heirem Khunjans and the Khumans had towards the superior Meiteis transformed in course of time into a complex. The people of Kakching had a shared hatred for the Meiteis, and the Meitei kings, and it was expressed in some way or the other when Meitei kings visited Kakching, though they could not revolt openly against the superiority complex of the kings and their retinues and the Imphal people. This was a natural psychological turn of the mind of the "colonized" people when they had to pay regular tribute to the king of the conqueror. Conditioned to this psychological situation over centuries and more than one thousand years, the people of Kakching developed some defense mechanism in their psyche, and an attending tendency of self-alienation.
The shared animosity among the Kakching people toward the Imphal people drove them together and unified them--this is the unity we are seeing; and the feeling of alienation drove them aloof from Imphal and the Imphal-centric Manipuri world, thereby developing their own reactive world based on self-reliance, which differentiates Kakching from other non-Imphal places. Self-reliance (= not-asking-the-Meitei-King-for-anything and not-depending-on-Imphal) also strengthened the Kakching unity. This powered them even to dig the 15 km (?) long main canal from Ithei Maru to the end of Kakching, and the very many capillary canals criss-crossing the town.
While this self-reliance proved an essential driving force in Kakching's distant past, it, practiced to almost an extreme extent in the community's recent past, since the establishment of democracy in the state (let's call it 1947), has proved quite detrimental (if not foolhardy) to its own progress by not being able to discard the mentality of alienation or aloofness from the state government which is seen quite as of Imphal (though not without reason), thereby not demanding much (of what's due) from the state government as most other communities in the state do. When the communitarian unity we had once started to disintegrate quite long ago (with the animosity toward Imphal having become less and less intense inversely proportionately) due to increasing interactions (in tandem with political changes in the country and the state over the last 60 years) with Imphal of all kinds driven by their daily necessities, the self-reliance mentality has withdrawn into individual psyches rather than the community psyche. The result is, the people of Kakching have the residues of self-reliance in their own families, but the self-"reliances" of the Kakching families do not meet or unite. They do neither rise together to demand something from the government, something which is due for them, nor come out, as they did in the past, to do something good for the community together.
That is why the rich and the middle class families either buy water from private tankers or drive on their own to the Kakching Water Supply Scheme reservoir to fetch water by themselves, leaving the rest of the community by themselves, to their own poor devices.
While this historical factors must also have their driving force, the new economic realities must also be playing a role in the community's individual psyches now. I guess some find it quite an outing to fetch water from the picnic-site-like water supply scheme at the foot of the now-fashionable Uyok Ching (which is not illegal and condemnable), while some find it better to push their water on bicycles long distances than being parched and dry at home.
While the nature of Kakching's unity and self-reliance has majorly be reactive, their industriousness has been quite inherent, not conditional
1. Rena writes: Myths and legends attempted to explain the origin and interconnection of the salais. Although there are slight variations in the number of clans listed, all the Puyas agree that the salais descended from Sidaba Mapu or Sidaba Salailen, the Divine Acestor of Ancestors. The Thiren Layat Puya asserts that all the sageis descended from one family, being born of the same lai (god). 2. Following Khelchandra's categorization, Rena ground the puyas under administration (48), arts and culture (42), charms and mantras (94), creation stories (3), fine arts (1), geography (31), geology (3), health and hygiene (6), genealogy (90), poetry (40), prediction (11), prose (29), religious philosophy (72), scripts (2), supernatural stories (8), yek-salai (42) and miscelaneous (64). Works CitedLaishram, R. (2009). Early Meitei History: Reigion, Society and Manipur Puyas. New Delhi, Delhi, India: Akansha Publishing House. Singh, N. K. (Ed.). (1984). A Catalogue of Manipuri Manuscripts. Manipur.
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