By Zahiruddin
CHITRAL: The villagers of Mori Lusht in Koh union council have protested the apathetic attitude of the government towards their plight who have lost their pastoral economy to the famine-like situation due to shortage of drinking as well as irrigation water caused by scanty rainfall which led to fading of springs of water.
Driven by frustration the highly desperate people of the village even warned the government that if their problem is not solved immediately, then they will have no option but to make mass migration into Afghanistan.
Talking to local reporters in Press Forum arranged by Chitral Press Club, the villagers said that the acute shortage of water in the area has brought misery to the village consisting of 162 households with 1421 population.
They said that the dwellers of the village have lost their sources of sustenance in the form of the crops of wheat, barley, maize and pulses, fruit orchards, livestock, poultry and vegetables which they grew on commercial scale.
Ikramullah, the naib-nazim of village council Mori Lusht, said that the village situated on the top of a plateau had a unique location fed by natural springs of water which faded away this year due to scanty rainfall.
He said that sensing the impending danger, the villagers started beseeching the concerned quarters of the government including the offices of DC, irrigation and public health engineering department right from the month of March this year but every where they were given cold shoulder by the officers.
The villagers bitterly criticized the irrigation department for turning deaf ear towards its miseries which did not open its irrigation channel of the department construed in late 1960s for the supply of irrigation water leading to the village from a nearby village named Istangol pretending the scarcity of water.
They said that when the crop of wheat and barley was completely destroyed cultivated on area estimated at 2000 acres of land when they failed to irrigate it and they failed to cultivate the crops of maize and pulses while no vegetable could be grown as well.
“More than 800 cows and oxen and 5000 heads of goats and sheep were sold by the villagers who herded them to the nearby villages and sold them at throw away prices as we had no other option.
Similarly, we sold out our poultry which was yet another source of our income and the irony is that even the honey bees have deserted the village due to the absence of vegetation and flowers while we used to sell hundreds of kilograms of honey in the local market for which our village was well known”, they clamoured.
Muhibur Rahman, Attaullah Khan, Sharif Muhammad and others dilated upon the miseries of the villagers and said that they fetched drinking from Koghuzi village at a distance of 8 kilometers on vehicles and this additional burden has further impoverished them.
They complained that although the department of public health engineering has spent more than Rs. 140 million on a drinking water supply from Golen village to its adjacent villages of Mori and Chumuruk, but the project is still incomplete despite the lapse of five years.
Haji Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a former member of zilla council elected in 1979, said that he used to get a bumper crop of maize every year amounting to 200 bags but it has dropped to zero this year and such is the situation prevalent there.
He said that the drying up of both fruit and non-fruit trees standing over a vast area of 800 acres of land is the loss whose recovery will take tens of years for the villagers as a plant takes at least ten years for its growth to maturity.
Talking on the occasion, Sartaj Ahmed Khan, the chairman of Chitral Community Development Network, an umbrella organization of 21 local support organizations, asked the government to rush to the rescue of the affected village of Mori Lusht with both short and long term measures for relief.
He suggested that a 6 km line of plastic pipe should be put in place above the earth surface to fetch water from Golen Gol while long term measure is the construction of an irrigation channel connecting it with Golen valley.
