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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The drought you didn't hear about: Villagers in Gujarat know a good monsoon won’t bail them out -Aarefa Johari

The drought you didn't hear about: Villagers in Gujarat know a good monsoon won’t bail them out -Aarefa Johari

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published Published on Jun 29, 2016   modified Modified on Jun 29, 2016
-Scroll.in

The government is calling it 'semi-scarcity'. In barren Saurashtra, farmers say that water promised to them from the Narmada project has not been reliable.

For almost three years, bathing has been a luxury for Manjuben Jhala.

The 50-year-old dairy farmer from Sowarada village has spent all her summer days herding cattle across the barren landscape of Gujarat’s Jamnagar district, in search of fodder and a few scoops of water for her frail animals. Walking for hours in the scorching sun would leave her dusty and sweaty, but there would be no relief waiting for her at home.

“When there is barely enough water for my family to drink and cook with, how can we think of having a bath?” said Jhala, a Dalit who lives with her husband, son, and daughter in a small brick hut. “Like most people in the village, we have been bathing once a week.”

On the morning of June 19, as the season’s first pre-monsoon drizzle made a brief appearance in Jamnagar, the villagers of Sowarada tried not to let their hopes up too high. The meteorological department has predicted a good monsoon this year, one that Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and other famously drought-hit states have been looking forward to for relief. But in Saurashtra, the region in western Gujarat where Jamnagar is located, farmers are all too aware that one good monsoon will not be enough to make up for the severe scarcity of resources, which have been aggravated by the state government’s refusal to declare a drought. When a state officially declares drought, the Centre and state roll out a series of contingency measures to provide food, drinking water, employment and fodder for livestock in order to mitigate the effects of drought.

In April, in the midst of pressure from the Supreme Court, the Gujarat government declared a state of “semi-scarcity” in 623 of its villages. Since then, that figure has been raised to 1,100 villages in Saurashtra, Kutch and North Gujarat. But the government still doesn’t believe that the state’s rainfall deficit in the last monsoon was acute enough to announce a drought.

On the ground, however, farmers and labourers have experienced poor rainfall for three consecutive monsoons, leading to increasingly low crop yields, a rise in distress migration and debt and dwindling reserves of drinking water, fodder and food. Even if the government and the national media may have ignored their plight, farmers say Saurashtra has been in a state of drought for at least three years.

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Scroll.in, 28 June, 2016, http://scroll.in/article/810574/the-drought-you-didnt-hear-about-villagers-in-gujarat-know-a-good-monsoon-wont-bail-them-out


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