Nearly 40 years after the signing of an agreement with Karnataka to provide drinking water to the districts of Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri, people here are racked by disease because of the high fluoride content in the water. Last December, during a trip to Krishnagiri, Stalin said the government would finalise all tenders (five global tenders were floated) for the Hogenakkal Integrated Drinking Water Project by March 2010. He also said that the project would be implemented as separate schemes in the Hosur region and remaining project sites. That’s still his campaign promise this time. People are continuing to be told that the water project will come in 2012. Meanwhile, the cost of the project has jumped by Rs 500 crore.
While the CM showed single-minded dedication to finish the assembly and secretariat complex, he has showed no interest to projects that will actually better the lives of people. In Pennagaram, water is so scarce that women have to trudge kilometers to get five pots of water once in three days. If the water project came up, the DMK would win hands down here. After all, how does having a swanky assembly help the people? But a water project won’t give the CM an ego boost, right?
Winner takes it all
Coming back to the bypoll drama, the area (on the Karnatka border and with a population of nearly two lakhs) has become yet another symbol for a political sop opera. It’s another issue that so many resources to conduct an election are being wasted less than a year before Pennagaram will go to the polls again with the other 233 assembly constituencies in the state. Anyway, it’s the last bypoll before an assembly election and the winner here takes all. And that is why CM M Karunanidhi, despite being wheelchair-bound, has campaigned personally, the first time he has done so in any bypoll. After winning most of the 10 bypolls since it came to power in 2006, the DMK cannot afford to slack off in the last lap. According to deputy CM Stalin, all other parties will lose their deposits and Kalaignar was going there only so that “the margin of victory can go up from 40,000 to 50,000”. AIADMK chief Jayalalitha cannot afford to lose after tasting defeat in all the other bypolls held, not to mention the desertions, including MLAs, from her party to the enemy camp that she is seeing regularly. So she went out there too, soon after her trip to her retreat in Kodanadu, but will it help? Would she have had a better chance if the opposition had united behind her? It’s too late for that anyway.