PANAJI
A cosy hamlet of about two dozen tile-roofed homes interspersed with modern, terraced bungalows still survives squeezed between the Dona Paula hill and a cute little beach once nick-named "Hawaii Beach". And, while the 80-odd inhabitants in it have all the water in the world before their eyes where the Zuari meets the Arabian Sea, piped water refuses to flow into their homes for days on end.
One resident said they don't get water, sometimes, for up to three to four days in a row. And when they do get their taps running, it's just a trickle for a maximum of one hour. "Which means, our overhead tanks never get filled," a resident said.
Also, there's no fixed time of the day when the water starts running in their taps, sometimes it flows early in the morning at 3.30 am and occasionally in the afternoon or evening.
"We have been made 'watchmen' to guard for water," the resident said, adding, "While records (register) at the reservoir which supplies to us show that they have released water, it just doesn't reach us."
Elsewhere in Posrebhat, Taleigao, water is supplied to the locality for about an hour daily but residents are perennially stressed every morning about whether water will flow in at 6 am, 615 am, 6.30 am and sometimes even later.
"So you patiently wait for water every morning. And the flow is mostly weak throughout the year.. like as if we are already in the month of May," said a Posrebhat resident.
At Taleigao's Martins Morod, water flows in the pipes sometimes at 6 pm, 7 pm or 8 pm. "There is no fixed time of the day and we have to order at least one taker every day for our society," a resident said.
At Nomoxint, another locality in Taleigao, water flows into taps for a little over an hour from 6 am to 7.15 am. The supply is more or less adequate but in some areas it is irregular. In nearby Hanuman Nagar, where there exist around 15 homes, several years have gone by but it still does not have piped water.
