India Is Crippled by Water Crisis
Climate Change Upsets the Monsoon Season
The monsoon is central to Indian life and lore. It turns up in ancient Sanskrit poetry and in Bollywood films. It shapes the fortunes of millions of farmers who rely on the rains to nourish their fields. It governs what you eat. It has its own music.
Climate change is now messing with the monsoon, making seasonal rains more intense and less predictable. Worse, short-sighted government policies are leaving millions defenseless in the age of climate disruptions, especially the poor.
After years of drought, Fakir Mohammed, a struggling farmer, stares at a field of corn ruined by pests and late rains. Rajeshree Chavan, a seamstress in Mumbai, has to sweep the sludge out of her flooded apartment not once, but twice during this year’s exceptionally fierce monsoon. The lakes that once held the rains in the bursting city of Bangalore are clogged with plastic and sewage.
People settle for the water they can find.
In a parched village, they gather around a fetid stream because that’s all there is. In Delhi, they worship in a river they hold sacred, even when it’s covered in toxic foam from industrial runoff. In Chennai, where kitchen taps have been dry for months, women sprint downstairs with neon plastic pots under their arms when they hear a water truck screech to a halt on their block.
The rains are more erratic today. This year, India experienced its wettest September in a century; more than 1,600 people were killed by floods; and even by the time harvest festivals rolled around in October, parts of the country remained inundated.
Even more troubling, extreme rainfall is more common and more extreme. Over the last century, the number of days with very heavy rains has increased, with longer dry spells stretching out in between. Less common are the sure and steady rains that can reliably penetrate the soil. This is ruinous
perts and teachers say.
“An entire generation is being left behind,” said Luis Bravo, an education researcher at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, the capital. “Today’s education system doesn’t allow children to become meaningful members of society.”
The government stopped publishing education statistics in 2014. But visits to more than a dozen schools in five Venezuelan states and interviews with teachers and parents indicate that attendance has plummeted this year, and many schools are closing.
Students began skipping school in Venezuela shortly after President Nicolás Maduro came to power in 2013. A fall in the price of the country’s main export, crude oil, combined with Mr. Maduro’s effort to double down on price and currency controls, sent the economy into a recession.
Some Venezuelan children are staying home because many schools have stopped providing meals or
Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting. because their parents can no longer afford uniforms, school utensils or bus fares. Others have joined parents in one of the world’s biggest displacement crises: About four million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, according to the United Nations.
Thousands of the country’s 550,000 teachers did not show up to classes when schools reopened in September, according to the national teachers’ union, ditching their $8 a month wages to try their luck abroad or in Venezuela’s illegal gold mines.
In Venezuela’s most-populous state, Zulia, up to 60 percent of 65,000 teachers have deserted in recent years, according to Alexander Castro, head of the local teachers’ union.
“They tell us that they prefer painting nails for a few dollars than work for a minimum wage,” he said.
To keep schools going, the remaining teachers often teach all of the subjects or combine different school years in one classroom. Nearly all of the schools visited have slashed working hours; some open for only a day or two a week.
In the village of Parmana in Venezuela’s central plains, only four out of 150 registered students attended school in October.
The students, of varying ages, sat in the same dilapidated classroom without electricity, practicing everything from the alphabet to algebra with the school’s sole teacher. The rest of the village’s children have joined their parents in the fields and fishing boats to help feed their families.
In the country’s second biggest city, Maracaibo, a sign outside a rundown school recently read: “Please come to classes, even without uniforms.”
After the summer holidays, half of the teachers didn’t return to a school in the town of Santa Barbara, forcing the principal to enlist parent volunteers to keep classes going.
For a decade until 2013, the country made steady improvements in school enrollment thanks to generous school meals and handouts of food, utensils and cash to parents and children. Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, built hundreds of new schools.
Mr. Chávez’s populist policies, however, focused more on the quantity of students in school than the quality of the education. Then, as the country’s coffers ran dry, his progress unraveled.
As attendance collapsed, Mr. Maduro continued to claim his government was focused on education spending.
“In Venezuela, not one school has closed or will ever close, not one classroom,” the president said in an address in April. “We will never deny access to education.”
In Boca de Uchire, the Caruto family has stopped sending its nine children to a nearby school when the cafeteria doesn’t open.
“I can’t send them to class hungry,” said José Luis Caruto, a 36-year-old unemployed father of two.
His sister, Yuxi Caruto, 17, was the last in the family to drop out from school. She tried taking up studies again at a local community center, but its teachers stopped showing up after two weeks of classes. She now spends her time taking care of her 1-year-old son.
“I want to learn to do the math and read and write rapidly,” she said. “I’m scared that when my son grows and starts asking questions, I won’t know how to respond. But right now, we don’t even have enough to eat.”
Where an ‘entire generation is being left behind.’