Background:
The objective of the Bike Rally was to create awareness amongst the people about the right to safe drinking water through educating and orienting the community on the process and procedures of negotiating with the panchayat, block and district administration to ensure water availability.
Due to consistent input and orientation on water related rights and entitlements to the Jansathis and community leaders, helping them to understand the governance structure at the panchayat, block and district level, roles and responsibilities of various government officials & departments, knowing existing water related schemes and entitlements, techniques of engaging in dialogues and negotiations in collectives have culminated into large volumes of grassroots complaints and demands making their way to panchayat, block and district offices.
Initiation of Bike Rally:
Through our effort of consistent handholding and orientation to field team, total 44032 IHHL were mobilized in 6 operational blocks. Though, we started operation with the support of Argyham in 6 blocks and covered 5 districts with an objective to bring about some policy level changes at district and state level; gradually as a spillover effect local Sangathans started escalating safe drinking water issues from other blocks and districts, resulting in creating immense pressure on local, district and state administration to deliver on people demand as per water and sanitation related rights and entitlements.
This culminated into a state – central level campaign linking water to ‘Right to Life’ (Article 21) and pressurizing respective state and central government to guarantee availability of safe drinking water as a right to every citizen. Furthermore, the campaign’s other objective was to pressurize the Odisha State Government to fulfill it’s election manifesto to provide pipeline tap water in every Panchayat. The campaign was launched in August wherein we initially covered 6 blocks and then gradually moved to other operational districts and then to the entire of Odisha, subsequently proceeding with central level campaign, associating other grass roots organizations to support the event.
After over 2 years of tedious exercise, the community was sensitized and educated on water contamination and water testing through 35 shivers covering 1071 village leaders and 340 villages. Through these shivers, they got an idea on the various types of water contamination and why there is a need for safe drinking water. Hence, community leaders unanimously decided to pressurize the local and district administration by submitting water samples in huge numbers for testing and sharing reports, so that they could know the water they are drinking is fit for them or not.
Consolidated Report of the Campaign:
| District | Block | No. of Trainings Conducted | No. of village Covered | No. of Households Covered | Total Participants | No. of Samples Submitted |
| Kandhmal | Baliguda | 3 | 61 | 4579 | 103 | 40 |
| Kandhmal | K-Nuagaon | 4 | 107 | 9062 | 148 | 40 |
| Koraput | Koraput | 6 | 32 | 646 | 189 | 85 |
| Malkangiri | Mathli | 17 | 123 | 1278 | 551 | 150 |
| Sundargarh | Hemgir | 4 | 9 | 81 | 51 | 2 |
| Sambalpur | Jamankira | 1 | 8 | 408 | 29 | 28 |
| Total | 35 | 340 | 16054 | 1071 | 367 |
Findings of Water Testing:
- Mathli : Out of 150 submitted samples 37 samples had iron beyond permissible limit.
- Koraput : Executive Engineer or RWSS department is a bit reluctant to share the water testing report, hence RTI was filed
- Jamankira : Out of total 28 submitted samples 6 samples had iron beyond permissible limit.
- Baliguda : Out of 40 submitted samples, administration did not accept 8 samples as it was collected from CHUA (stream). Hence, from submitted 32 samples 6 samples had iron contamination beyond permissible limit.
- K. Nuagaon : Administration is a bit reluctant to share the report.
- Hemgir : After doing several follow ups with RWSS, they have been making excuses time and again.
The Way Forward:
- Preparing village cadres to demand water as an act by writings petitions and memorandum.
- Bringing the campaign and demand to the state level and then to take it to the National level so that the pressure can be built on administration for community demands.
- Educating the community in testing the water samples so that they are aware about contamination of water.