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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Drought laxity finger at govts
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: A month has gone by since the Supreme Court issued directions to tackle drought but it is "business as usual" for the Centre and the affected states, civil society organisations have said.

Worse, government intervention is even less than what it used to be in colonial times, they said. A quarter of the country is drought-hit at present.

On May 11, the apex court had pronounced the Centre guilty of "washing its hands of" a national disaster on a PIL filed by the Swaraj Abhiyan. It had also hauled up Gujarat, Bihar and Haryana for their "ostrich-like attitude" towards declaring drought.

Lamenting the "collective failure of our conscience", several civil society groups working in different areas - food security, mid-day meal scheme and the rural job scheme - have decided to pool resources to monitor the implementation of the court directives.

According to Swaraj Abhiyan's Yogendra Yadav, in the first month after the court order, all that was done by various governments amounted to "minimum compliance" with its directives.

Referring to what he termed "these ridiculous debates on gau mata", the activist-politician said: "Millions of cattle are dying because of the famine. This could well be the worst cattle famine in the last three decades. We have appealed to animal rights groups and gaushalas to step in and look after the animals as the drought-distressed people are not in a position to care of them. But there has been little response."

The Supreme Court-appointed commissioner in the Right to Food case, Harsh Mander, said no deaths by drought had been confirmed so far, but added that the government's approach appeared to be to "avoid deaths with minimal costs". "This is what the colonial powers did and this is what the governments are doing now," he said.

On interventions with regard to food, Mander said the response of the Centre and state governments had been one of "extraordinary absence of action and accountability" and the drought appeared peripheral in their priorities.

The finance minister had begun speaking of judicial overreach, Mander said, when all the court had done was ask the government to implement a law passed by Parliament. Instead of providing foodgrain to states at the National Food Security Act rate, they were being told to purchase supplies at the MSP for distribution.

Mander compared the interventions on Thursday to those in the 1980s when he was in the civil services. "Back then, a drought used be the central preoccupation of the Centre#- then the government would do whatever it could even though it would appear inadequate.

"Now, in neo-liberal times, we are doing even less than what the British did before Independence during a drought. This is shameful at an1y time, more so for the 'fastest growing economy'," he said.

RTI activist Nikhil Dey flagged the omissions in implementation of the rural job scheme despite an undertaking by the Centre in court that the ceiling of 100 days of work would be extended to 150 in drought-affected states. As of date, only Karnataka has notified the additional 50 days.

Besides, the Centre is yet to release the first tranche of payments due in April. Workers have not been given the delayed payment compensation either.

Dipa Sinha, who works in the field of mid-day meals, listed how the court directive to continue the school lunch programme through the summer holidays had been ignored by most states.

In cases where it was followed, a decision was either taken towards the end of the holidays or the information was not disseminated properly, so few children benefited.