SULTANPUR LODHI: Environmentalist and Rajya Sabha member Balbir Singh Seechewal has started a campaign to save underground water. He has appealed to farmers to use water from the Bist Doab Canal in agriculture.
Seechewal, after inspecting different areas of the distributaries of the Bist Doab passing through Doaba, noted that Punjab uses only 34 per cent of the canal water, while Rajasthan uses double the amount of canal water. In the early days, efforts were made for the supply of water to every farm by means of ‘sue’ and ‘kasia’. However, in Doaba, the farmers have preferred to use pumped water instead of canal water.
Seechewal said, now, a pipeline would be laid to deliver canal water to the fields, and that the entire cost of the project would be borne by the Punjab Government. He said that during a meeting with CM Mann, he had vowed that the state government would bear the entire cost of the pipes required to bring water from the canals to the fields.
Seechewal said the Bist Doab Canal has the capacity to flow 1,450 cusecs of water, but unlike the farmers of Malwa, the farmers in this region are not demanding canal water. Owing to that, 1,450 cusecs of water has never been released in the Bist Doab Canal.
He said that from the year 2016, the project to concrete the banks of the canals of Bist Doab was started so that the water could reach its destination, but after crores of rupees were spent for paving the canal, but no arrangement was made to take the water to the fields.
Seechewal said that according to the 2017 report of the Central Ground Water Board, the ground water in Punjab would be 1,000 feet deep by 2039, which would make farming very difficult. Extracting water from such a depth would be a big challenge in itself.