DA Editorial Desk | Sara Debbarma
Residents of East Kolabaria in Belonia, led by local women, blocked the Belonia–Santirbazar road this week, demanding a permanent solution to a drinking water shortage that had left them without regular supply for a month. Water tankers sent by the department, they said, arrived irregularly and in insufficient quantity, forcing many to walk long distances for water. Repeated complaints to the Panchayat and block officials had gone nowhere. It took a blockade, and the South District Magistrate’s own vehicle getting caught in it, to bring Water Resources Department officials, the Block Development Office, police and TSR forces to the spot. Officials eventually assured a permanent fix by April, with daily tanker supply in the interim. The women lifted the blockade and traffic resumed.
Read on its own, this is a story with a reasonably satisfying ending — grievance raised, officials mobilised, assurance given. Read alongside similar episodes from across Tripura over the past two years, it looks like something else entirely: a single, recurring script performed in a different village each time. Women carrying empty pots and pitchers have blocked roads over drinking water shortages in Bishnupur, Kadamtala, Unakoti’s Kailasahar, Krishnapur, Panchmanagar and South Maheshpur, among other places, each time after weeks or months of unanswered complaints to local panchayats, each time resolved only once a blockade forced officials to the spot, and each time accompanied by assurances that the underlying problem would finally be fixed.
This pattern deserves to be named for what it is: a sign that Tripura’s grievance redressal system for basic water supply does not reliably work through its normal channels. A woman in East Kolabaria should not need to stand in a highway for her complaint about a broken pipeline or an erratic tanker schedule to reach someone with the authority to act. That this script has repeated itself in district after district, under the state’s own “mission mode” Jal Jeevan push to deliver tap connections to every household, suggests the gap is not one of policy intent but of responsiveness at exactly the local level where water actually reaches — or fails to reach — a family’s tap.
The officials’ assurance of a permanent solution by April deserves to be tracked, not simply filed away as this week’s resolution. East Kolabaria’s residents have heard promises of this kind before, in other villages, under other circumstances. What would genuinely break this pattern is not another tanker schedule or another verbal assurance at the roadside, but a public, dated commitment — published, not merely spoken — specifying what “permanent solution” means in East Kolabaria’s case and holding the Water Resources Department to that timeline in full view of the public.
Until Tripura’s water grievance system works reliably without a blockade attached, this newspaper expects to be writing some version of this same story again, in some other village, before the year is out. That expectation, more than any single resolved protest, is the real measure of how far the state still has to go.