India’s ‘waterman’ blames Shivraj Patil, Vilasrao Deshmukh for crisis in Latur

Amid growing concerns over the drought situation in Maharashtra come allegations that late Congress leader Vilasrao Deshmukh and former Lok Sabha speaker Shivraj Patil Chakurkar are to blame for the water crisis in Latur owing to their emphasis on sugarcane farming in a region unfit for the same. Renowned water expert Rajendra Singh further claimed that Deshmukh had three canals running from the Manjara River to his sugarcane farms.

Speaking with reporters at The Asian Age office, Mr Singh said that the drought in Marathwada was not natural, but man-made. Stressing that sugarcane cultivation was responsible for the drought, Mr Singh said that sugarcane needed a lot of water, and while it was easy for farmers to switch on electrical motors to supply water to their farms, they ended up ignoring how much water was being extracted from wells or tube wells. The Magsaysay Award winner termed sugarcane a “lazy crop”. In time, he pointed out, the groundwater table is depleted, and starts to fall, with adverse impact on all crops.

Mr Singh said that when the first five-year plan was announced in 1957, there was no water crisis in any village or town.

Criticising Maharashtra’s Jal Yukta Shivar Abhiyan, he said that the state's Chief Minister had stated people’s participation would be necessary in this Abhiyan, but while people’s participation was good in the first year, this time around, the scheme had not found a good response. The water expert said that the Jal Yukta Shivar Abhiyan had become contractor-driven and all that contractors were interested in was profit and not the welfare of the people.

Asked about the severe water crisis in Latur, Mr Singh said that local political leaders were responsible for the situation.

“Deshmukh had constructed five dams, out of which two were constructed in his fields. He did work only for sugarcane. Media focus on Latur was only because of these leaders-", he said. According to him, the water crisis was worse in Osmanabad than in Latur. Mr Singh said that the state could overcome the water crisis by changing crop patterns. He advised the state’s farmers to shift focus from sugarcane to pulses which could survive with very little water.

“I met several people from Latur and other regions of Marathwada and appealed to them to shift their crop pattern and fortunately, not a single farmer disagreed with me. Everybody agreed with me. In Rajasthan, though there has been no rain for the past three successive years, farmers have produced three yields in a single year,” he said, adding that water availability there was less than Maharashtra, but there was no crisis of the kind afflicting farmers here.