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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.