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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

India stares at water scarcity -Gopalkrishna Gandhi

-The Hindu

Tackling drought must be the immediate priority for administrators across the country

The coming elections to the Lok Sabha, crucial to the future of our democracy, our pluralism, our federalism, are only a few weeks away.

But something else, something urgent, something is already upon us. And something that is going to coincide with the elections. A drought.

The rains have failed us. Nothing new, one might say. True, except that the rains’ let down this time comes on top of an already low-rain and, in many places, no-rain ground situation. And the next nearest rains are six months away. The cruelly blue, cloudless skies over much of India, north, central, eastern and peninsular India, say it all. And there is no guarantee that June will see the onset of a normal monsoon.

What the sky says

Does anyone care? Does the political class? The Prime Minister and Chief Ministers are not unaware of the situation. They cannot be. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has given them enough data. But when droughts and elections intersect, it is extremely uncomfortable to leaders. It is inconvenient to dwell on the skies’ tidings. Which government would like to tell farmers that suffering lies at their threshold? Who would like to tell them that water will be scarcer than before, that aquifers will plummet, crops wither, livestock go thirsty? Which government would, just weeks before the elections, tell us that with reservoirs drying up taps will sputter to a stop and that we may well be looking at water-rationing? The truth is, none of them will say that. This is where, as Amartya Sen has told us time and again, the media comes in, and comes in redemptively. It is India’s great good luck that public awareness, nudged and prodded by public discussions on meteorological data and media reportage, has kept droughts from deepening into famines in our country.

The IMD report on scant rains has received scant attention so far, with exceptions being provided by P. Sainath’s relentless warnings and observations of experts of the calibre and veracity of Ramchandra Sable, agro-meteorologist, and D.M. More, Secretary of the Second Maharashtra Irrigation Commission, reported in The Hindustan Times (January 6, 2019).

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