Acute water shortage hits village 
Shariq Majeed
Tribune News Service

Balakote-Mendhar (Poonch), March 6
Even as the state government is planning to introduce information technology (IT) in most of the sectors, it seems to have miserably failed in providing clean drinking water to the villagers here.
Every morning, Shamima Begum (35), treks down three km from her village to get a bucket of water to cook food for her children.
The practise of fetching water from the nearby spring has not changed for her even though weather sometimes plays spoilsport, but she braves the hostile weather to cook a meal for her children.
Although her village is supplied adequate quantity of drinking water in government records, but practically not enough water for drinking purpose is being provided. Thousands of villagers living in this village which lies just close to the Line of Control (LOC) is not different since the government's claim of providing drinking water in far-flung villages has eluded them.
“You have water pipes here but the department concerned doesn't supply water. There is no water supply infrastructure like pipes when they cannot supply clean drinking water on a daily-basis.
Since water is needed for almost all domestic activities, we have no other option but to fetch water from the springs which are far from here,” rued Shamima.
“It is not easy to get water from these springs since there is a huge rush of people. Sometimes it takes hours to get water.” She said the government should provide clean drinking water on a regular-basis and then think of introducing IT in a majority of the sectors.
“Since the Water Supply Department (WSD) has failed in supplying water and supplies water once in two-three days, we are facing a lot of problems”, Shafi Khan, another resident said.
Meanwhile, all efforts to contact senior officials of the water supply department proved futile.
However, a junior officer, while admitting that there was water shortage in the area said the problem was not so huge as it was made out to be.