THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A tourist visiting Kovalam beach during the latter half of summer might feel like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mariner in his famous poem ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. “Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink”.
Domestic and international tourists arriving at the marquee beach destination are having a hard time because of non-operational washrooms and the absence of public taps. Hit by acute water shortage, contractors have shut down comfort stations and washrooms at Light House beach, Samudra Beach and Eve’s Beach. The influx of domestic tourists has gone up recently because of summer holidays.
More than three years have gone by since the Tourism Department had allotted Rs 14 crore to the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) for implementing a drinking water scheme in Kovalam area. A top Tourism Department official said that non-availability of water was becoming a serious issue and was standing in the way of area development. “We mooted this project as a permanent solution but it is progressing at a snail’s pace. We had taken up this matter with the government,” the official said.
Currently, the contractors running public comfort stations are depending on private water tankers. It is off season now and contractors running the facilities are not making water available to domestic tourists. The wells in the area had all dried up and there was no water supply line in the beach area, Vellar councillor Jyothi Satheesan, under whose ambit Kovalam falls, said: “I have lost my peace of mind. People keep calling me as if I am to blame for the water crisis.”
A senior KWA engineer said that the '14-crore project did not take off because of non-availability of land to install the treatment plant. The bottleneck was believed to have been removed after the agriculture department had handed over the land and the project was awarded. But, as Ms Satheesan puts it “no one was interested, no follow ups were done and the project just got forgotten.” Even she now thinks of digging new wells rather than reviving the KWA project.
