Bore Well and Hand Pump Project ~ Anna Nagar, Tamil Nadu, India
by Peter Coughlan, PhD, Executive Director of WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water
Anna Nagar consists of a hamlet of around 25 huts and two decaying concrete buildings. It is about 15 miles west of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, Southeast India. Its inhabitants, around 60 in number, all belong to the Irula scheduled tribal people. These people, who have long experienced discrimination, live isolated lives on the edge of communities of the scheduled castes and for the most part, they are desperately poor. The men make their living as occasional agricultural laborers, for example cutting down the thorn trees which are a blight on the land, or working on the casuarina trees that provide commercial wood used for wooden posts, the construction of huts, wood pulp, and so on. (click on images to enlarge)
Their infrastructure is minimal. They depended, for example, for water on a municipal water source some distance away that provided, when all was functioning properly, water for half an hour a day. When that water failed, as often happened, they relied on a local community with whom, however, there has been a degree of antagonism and therefore there was uncertainty regarding water supplies. Among their greatest needs was an independent water source.
The Irula people are for the most part semi-nomadic, but their presence in Anna Nagar goes back about fifty years due to an Irula man who agreed to work as a bonded labourer for a local landowner in exchange for permission to live on half an acre of land. In the course of time he and his descendants managed to purchase this land, something that is not at all easy to achieve for these tribal people.
Thanks to funding provided by staff of the JosephJoseph company in collaboration with WaterBridge Outreach, SAVE Int’l has been able to install a bore well and a hand pump in this hamlet.