Only 20% of persons paying Water Users’ Association fee

Black Bush Polder Water Users Association now has a new management committee.
Elections for the Black Bush Polder Water Users’ Association Management Committee were held, and saw Deonarine Persaud being elected as the new Chairman, to serve for the next two years. The management committee will remain in place for four years, and after the first two-year of its existence, elections will be held for a chairperson and other office bearers.
Meanwhile, National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA) National Coordinator of Water Users Associations, Shiv Sankar, noted that only twenty per cent of the landowners were paying their land taxes to the association.
Persons have to be up to date with their payments in order to be eligible for election. Several persons who were deemed unfit had been paying to the Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC), and others were paying to the Lands and Surveys Department, depending on how the land was acquired.
Sankar called on the new board to encourage farmers to pay their taxes. “They may want to go back to the laws of Guyana, under the Drainage and Irrigation Act, where they can take legal action against those who are reluctant in paying their rates,” he opined.
The full Management Committee comprises: Deonarine Persaud as Chairman, Bendernauth Mohabir as Vice Chairman, Mark Narain as Secretary, and Sheleeza Bux as Treasurer. The five committee members are Lall Bahadur Singh, Shiv Devi Premnauth, Claude Rebeiro, Vorad Premnauth and Compton Persaud.
The WUA’s primary task is to ensure that the secondary canals are cleared and functioning well. According to Regional Chairman David Armogan, the last WUA did more than that, working outside of the agreement.
“They were able to monitor the sluices wherever there was heavy rainfall. I know sometimes the Chairman used to be there at midnight until 2 O’clock in the morning, to make sure that the operators work. He was also able to do other things that the region might have slipped up on. The region sometimes takes a lot of time to deliver some of these services, because of the red tape and procedure you have to go through; and so Richie use to take up that slack, and from time to time he would buy batteries for the pump, he would repair the lighting plant, and all the other little things that (go) with making sure that the farmers are happy,” Armogan said.
Black Bush Polder is an important part of the Region Six economy, since it produces close to seventy per cent of the region’s rice, along with cash crops and livestock.