The specter of drought is hanging ominously over nearly half the total land area of India. There are indeed a few pockets that have received excess rainfall. But in much of the country, the monsoon has either failed or is extremely
deficient. This is perhaps as good a time as any to realize that one of the biggest weaknesses of India’s development experience over the last six decades has been the collective inability of the people of this country to better manage our limited water resources. We have no one to point a finger at but ourselves. To a greater or lesser extent, each one of us is guilty of profligacy in the use of water. Unfortunately, we don’t wake up to the grim reality until a drought stares at us in the face – as it has this year.
Meteorological maps on the progress of the monsoon, its spatial and temporal distribution, are regularly being carried in newspapers. Television channels are highlighting reports of the hardships that are being faced by millions of farmers across the length and breadth of India. Many believe the worse is yet to come and that even more acute water shortages would be experienced during the summer of 2010. There is growing realization that conflicts of the future would be based on access to water, in this country and elsewhere.
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, who studied the Bengal famine of 1943 in detail, had pointed out that although an estimated three million people died in eastern India that year, there was no real shortage of rice. Yes indeed, the British colonial rulers of the time were callous and so were local traders who hoarded grain stocks in the expectation of high prices during the World War II. The point is simple: people died in the famine because they did not have the necessary purchasing power, the entitlement to food. In other words, the problem historically and today has never been one of production but an issue concerning distribution and access to food.
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| Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |
Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has said no Indian citizen will go hungry. A proposed National Food Security Bill is currently being drafted that envisages a strengthening of the public distribution system (PDS). The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is being revamped and the minimum wage payable to unskilled laborers under the Act is already up to Rs 100 a day. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has conceded that food output will fall because sowing is lower by a fifth. This year may not be as bad as 1987 which was described as a year that witnessed the “worst drought of the century”. That year, drinking water had to be transported across hundreds of kilometers on railway tankers. Nevertheless, what is worrying is that the drought appears to have been particularly severe is those parts of north-western India that are also agriculturally the most prosperous, namely, Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
A detailed study based on satellite imagery by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States government that has just been published in the prestigious Nature journal has indicated an alarming fall in groundwater levels across northern India. Low levels of water in reservoirs would impact not just irrigation but hydro-electricity generation too.
The wholesale price index is in negative territory but food prices are going through the roof, hurting the pockets of the poor the most. Exports of non-basmati rice and wheat have been banned as they had been last year. Still, a scam occurred in 2008 wherein non-basmati rice was exported to particular African countries ostensibly as humanitarian aid but actually benefited a corrupt few.
The time is opportune to examine closely the structural deficiencies in agriculture in this country and address these as expeditiously as possible. Here are a few facts about Indian agriculture that are worth mulling over. The rate of growth of agricultural production picked up from nil in 2004-05 to 5.8 per cent in 2005-06, came down 3.8 per cent in 2006-07, went up to 4.5 per cent in 2007-08 and again declined 1.6 percent in 2008-09 – this was a period when the Indian economy grew by 9 per cent plus each year for the first time in the country’s history.
The share of agriculture in India’s national income has come down from 50 per cent to below 20 per cent over the last four decades, but the share of the country’s population dependent on agriculture has declined a slower pace in this period from over 75 per cent to around 60 per cent. Importantly, as much as 60 per cent of the total cropped area in India is not irrigated. Three-fourths of the total precipitation in India occurs during a four month period. Thus, the importance of water management can scarcely be underscored. There is evidence to indicate that our parents and their parents were able to manage the country’s water resources better than the present generation has been able to.
One should not then be surprised to learn that at least 10,000 farmers committed suicide each year between 1993 and 2003 due to their inability to repay loans. To use exact statistics compiled by the government, 16,632 farmers committed suicide in 2007 against 17,060 in 2006 – the five worst affected states are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The government’s Rs 71,000-crore farm-loan waiver scheme has not helped small and marginal farmers who are indebted to local moneylenders
We have to stop praying to Indra Bhagwan at this juncture and instead, get our act together. Each and every citizen of this country has a duty to conserve water and utilize it far more efficiently that we are doing at present.
The author is an educator, an economic analyst and a journalist with over 30 years of experience in various media—print, radio, television, Internet and documentary cinema.
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