Mother, daughters drown while washing clothes at a well in Telangana’s Narayankhed

During the summer season, the residents of several villages in Narayankhed including Borgi depend on open wells not only for washing their clothes, but also for their bathing and drinking needs

Hyderabad: In a tragic incident, a mother and her two daughters drowned in an open well while washing clothes on the shore.

The incident took place in Borgi village of Kangti mandal in Sangareddy district on Tuesday, May 5, when Savitri Bai, accompanied by her daughters Nikita (13) and Nandini (12), was washing clothes in an open well in the village.

What caused the drowning was not immediately ascertained, but all three of them fell and drowned in the deep well. The villagers who went to the well, saw the clothes on the shore but the three missing, launched a search and pulled out the bodies from the well.

With such a tragedy, a pall of gloom descended on the village which is predominantly populated with Banjaras (Lambadas).

It has been known that Kangti mandal in Narayanpet assembly constituency, which borders Karnataka, is one of the most backward areas of Telangana, with hardly any basic facilities provided to the people.

During the summer season, the residents of several villages including Borgi depend on open wells not only for washing their clothes, but also for their bathing and drinking needs, as the ground water depletes rapidly to alarming levels. The women in this area have to walk long distances to fetch water just for basic needs.

There were instances during the drought years when women in this region used to make their children stand on webbed foldable cots, place a wide container under the cot, and give bath to their children, so that the residual water would be collected in the container placed under the cot, which would be reused.

The open wells in these areas are also very wide and deep, where women can be seen entering the wells in highly risky conditions. a slight slip from the narrow granite steps can lead them to directly falling inside the well.

Lambada women usually go to these wells in groups to fetch water, standing in reachable distances from each other as if forming a chain, passing the filled pots from the well to the top, with each of the woman passing the pot to the next woman above.

Though it was not immediately known how the drowning incident happened, it exposes the harsh reality despite tall claims of successive governments of providing potable water to every household in every hamlet across the state through fancily named schemes spending tens of thousands of crores of people’s money.