CHITRAL: The residents of Mori Lusht village in Koh union council here have condemned the government apathy towards their plight caused by shortage of drinking and irrigation water because of less rainfall.

They warned the government that if their problems were not resolved immediately they would have no option but to migrate to Afghanistan.

Talking to reporters at the Chitral Press Club on Sunday, the villagers said acute water shortage had brought misery to the village consisting of 162 households with 1,421 people. They said the villagers had lost their sources of sustenance in the form of crops of wheat, barley, maize and pulses, fruit orchards, livestock, poultry and vegetables which they grew on commercial scale.

Ikramullah, the naib nazim of Mori Lusht village council, said the village situated on top of a plateau had a unique location fed by natural springs which had faded away this year due to scanty rainfall.

The villagers criticised the irrigation department for not opening an irrigation channel to supply irrigation water to the village from nearby Istangol village on the pretext of scarcity of water.

They said wheat and barley crops cultivated on estimated 2,000 acres of land were destroyed for want of irrigation water, adding they also failed to cultivate maize, pulses and vegetables due to shortage of water.

“Over 800 cows and oxen and 5,000 goats and sheep were sold by the villagers at throwaway rates as they had no other option. Similarly, we sold our poultry which was yet another source of our income and the irony is that even the honeybees have deserted the village due to absence of vegetation and flowers,” narrated a villager, saying they used to sell hundreds of kilogrammes of honey in the local market.”

The residents said they fetched drinking water from Koghuzi village at a distance of eight kilometers on vehicles. They complained that although the public health and engineering department had spent more than Rs140 million on a water supply scheme from Golen village to its adjacent villages of Mori and Chumuruk, the project was still incomplete despite lapse of five years.

Haji Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a former member of the district council, said he used to get a bumper crop of maize every year amounting to 200 bags but it has dropped to zero this year.

He said both the fruit and non-fruit trees standing over 800 acres of land had been destroyed due to the dry spell.

On the occasion, Sartaj Ahmed Khan, chairman of Chitral Community Development Network, suggested that a pipeline should be laid from Golen Gol to the village in the short-term, while in the long-term the government should construct an irrigation channel connecting the village with Golen valley to meet the water shortage.

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2018