Jammu, April 02 (INFO) The Minister for PHE, Irrigation, Flood Control and Horticulture, Mr. Mohammad Dilawar Mir today called for a workable contingency plan to deal with draught due to continued dry spell in the State.
Speaking at a meeting of the senior PHE & Civil and Mechanical engineers here today, the Minister directed the engineers to gear up men and machinery to device short and long term measures to face the challenge posed by the draught and to provide adequate drinking and irrigation water facilities to the people.
Minister of State for PHE, Dr. Romesh Chander Sharma, Chief Engineer, PHE Jammu, Mr. V K Goswami, concerned Superintending Engineers of Jammu Division and Executive Engineers were present in the meeting.
The Minister asked the engineers and officers of the Horticulture, Agriculture, PHE and Irrigation departments to dove-tail their resources and programmes to cope-up with the scarcity of water for drinking and irrigation purposes due to dry spell. Adding that the main focus should be on devising modern water harvesting technologies, he directed the engineers to conduct the ground survey to identify areas where water sources have dried-up completely so that alternate arrangements to revive defunct schemes are taken at an earliest. The Minister said that J&K has tremendous scope for rain water harvesting as compared to Rajasthan where this programme has been a big success.
He said each executive engineer should immediately work out requirement of tanker service, tube well, hand pumps and water harvesting tanks in their respective areas as a major to make up for water shortage. The Minister asked the engineers and officer to launch a vigorous awareness campaign to educate people about keeping water bodies and rivers clean adding that all possible measures need to be taken to check flow of sewage and garbage in to rivers. He also made fervent appeal to the people to make judicious use of water in view of fast depleting water table in the rivers and water bodies.