In its report, which will be submitted to the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) on Sunday, the committee has just pointed out the need of another fact-finding team led by a hydro-geologist to verify the claims of the locals of Gothatar.[break]
The Gothatar locals have claimed that water in their dug wells has gone down alarmingly in the last few years due to excessive exploitation of ground water by some industries. They have demanded that all industries that excessively extract ground water be removed from Gothatar. To press their demand, they had earlier encircled the VDC office for hours, ultimately forcing the MoUD to form a team to find out if there was any correlation between commercial ground water extraction and drying up of the wells in Gothatar.
The team headed by Sushil KC, an engineer from the KVWSMB, which inspected the sites of ground water extraction in Gothatar last week.
According to KC, his team failed to establish or rule out the possibility due to the lack of a baseline study. ´Without looking at the finding of a previously conducted study, we cannot surely say whether commercial water extraction has caused depletion of water level in dug wells,´ said KC. ´We can arrive at any conclusion only after comparing our new findings with previous studies.´
Shiva Hari Pokharel, coordinator of a struggle committee formed by the Gothathar locals, said that they will not back down just because a technical committee fails to find correlation between drying up of dug wells and commercial exploitation of ground water. ´Only we know our sufferings,´ he said. ´We will continue to agitate until the industries that exploit ground water halt operations.´
Around 100 tankers of ground water is being extracted from Gothatar every day by three industries.
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