[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
dam-l LS: Opinion piece from The Hindu on the Water Crisis
The Hindu
Tuesday, April 25, 2000
Water crisis
ONE OF NATURE'S scourges is making its periodic visitations on large
parts of the country. Officially
the country has enjoyed 12 consecutive years of a `normal' monsoon,
but particular areas did not escape a deficiency in rainfall in 1999.
Though that should have alerted the administration to the emergence
of a regional drinking water and fodder crisis, as is often the case
the Central and State Governments are only now waking up to its
severity in drought-affected areas of western Rajasthan, the
Saurashtra and Kutch regions of Gujarat, Malwa in Madhya Pradesh and
Telengana in Andhra Pradesh.
Since the next two months are going to be a critical period, the
response to the appeal for public
contributions by the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, has
to be immediate and overwhelmingly
positive if the people in the affected towns and villages are to be
helped tide over the summer. The Centre cannot escape its own
responsibility to provide more funds than it has so far. The
decisions that the Centre has recently taken - larger allocations of
cereals at lower prices and the provision of more grain for
'food-for-work' programmes - are important but insufficient given the
challenges before the 2000 monsoon hopefully brings the drought to an
end. There will be corruption in the use of such funds, as the
allegations of misappropriation during the relief operations after
the Orissa cyclone of last November demonstrated, venality shows no
respect for the human condition. But the likelihood of corruption is
no reason to close the tap on financial assistance. The horrifying
reports from the afflicted areas of women walking more than 10 km to
fetch a pot of water, of towns receiving water once a week for less
than a hour, of `water riots' and of cattle dying in `cattle camps'
because of a lack of fodder should have galvanised the local
administration into action. While some State Governments are indeed
doing their best to cope with a difficult situation, it is
astonishing that Mr. Keshubhai Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat,
still insists that there is ``absolutely no crisis'' in any part of
the State. There can be no ambiguity about the emergency action that
is required. First, new borewells have to be dug, existing ones
deepened if possible, damaged hand-pumps repaired and in the extreme
`water trains' arranged - all for drinking water. Second, since
employment disappears as the crops wither in the fields, public works
programmes that combine cash with kind payment are essential to prop
up incomes. Third, expensive it may be but if necessary fodder has to
be transported to the affected areas to prevent large-scale death of
livestock.
The immediate task is to alleviate the blight of this summer, but
there is a long-term agenda that the country should not lose sight
of. The severity of the drinking water shortage in Gujarat and
Rajasthan tells us that the `water crisis' that many have warned will
strike India in the 21st century has already arrived. A crisis has
been brewing over years in different parts of the country as
groundwater resources have been over-exploited, water- intensive
crops grown in dry areas and Government-planned projects implemented
with little regard for local concerns and local conditions. When a
monsoon fails, it does not cause a crisis, it only worsens one -
whose severity increases in areas that traditionally receive only
moderate amounts of rainfall. But this need not be the case. As the
fairly large experiments in Alwar by the Tarun Bharat Sangh and in
Ralegaon Siddhi by Mr. Anna Hazare have shown, dry areas can be made
green and drinking water available for all with people's involvement
in a methodical harvesting of rain water and a careful use of
available surface and groundwater resources. If the ongoing crisis
gives a new direction to the harvesting, use and conservation of the
country's water resources then it may yet have given a painful but
necessary lesson for a better future.