Droughts in India: A manmade failure

The shocking revelation that 33 crore people, or almost 25 per cent of the population, are reeling under the enormous pain of drought points more to a manmade failure than to nature. There is no doubt some areas got scanty rainfall, but this is no reason for people to suffer when technology has advanced tremendously to enable the growing of crops that require less water, the rotating of crops, etc., to mitigate the effects of dry spells. For instance, in Maharashtra — one of the supposedly more progressive states of India — 21 out of 36 districts are affected by drought, and most of it, as the “Waterman”, Rajendra Singh of Jaipur, says, is manmade. According to him, the drought in Latur is made by politicians who have been growing sugarcane, which consumes huge amounts of water, in drought-prone districts, and have also set up sugar factories. Some politicians have been diverting precious canal water to their sugarcane farms.

Also, the Maharashtra Groundwater Development and Management Act has been in existence since 2009 but the Congress government did nothing to implement it. The BJP’s Narendra Fadnavis government has just woken up to enforcing this law. Even so, the tanker mafia still rules here with 4,356 tankers supplying water to Aurangabad and Amravati. The situation in Uttar Pradesh is the worst with 50 of the 75 districts affected.

Water in India as a whole has been so recklessly squandered that 72 per cent of the underground bank of water has been depleted. There has been no serious concern about recharging and conservation practices.

Mr Singh, who has toured 280 districts countrywide, said he has told all the concerned district magistrates to undertake rainwater conservation projects and align the crop and rain patterns, but most have not bothered to undertake water rejuvenation programmes.

There is now some hope since Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reached out to youth organisations to undertake a massive effort under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for water storage and conservation in the next few months.

This work will have to be closely monitored. The chief minister of each state must be held accountable for implementing these schemes. Perhaps the Prime Minister should take the advice of Mr Singh and form a “Reserve Water Body Bank” to oversee the work.

Some parts of the country have seen water scarcity for two consecutive years and yet it took the Supreme Court to demand accountability from the Centre. The state governments have not been implementing the Food Security Act or the Centre’s drought manual and there is no accountability for this. Only by recharging underground water banks will we be able to improve the future of the drought-prone districts.