LOOMING DROUGHT
A PROLONGED DRY SPELL, COUPLED WITH DEFICIENT PRE-MONSOON RAINS AND OFFICIAL APATHY, CASTS A SPECTRE OF DROUGHT ON LARGE PARTS OF THE COUNTRY
A widespread drought spells further doom for our already distressed hinterlands
JAISALMER ADDITIONAL DM BHAGIRATH BISHNOI SAYS 95 PER CENT OF THE DISTRICT IS FACING A DROUGHT
DDrought. The word brings to mind dry, cracked earth and scorching, cloudless skies. Rains falter, rivulets, village wells and even hand-pumps run dry, farms turn into dustbowls, trees and foliage wilt and livestock goes thirsty. The spectre is for real this summer and has already assumed alarming proportions. Across India, a devastating drought threatens to spell doom for the already distressed hinterlands.
Take Bagicha Dera, a Pilani tehsil hamlet in Banda district, Bundelkhand. Kaalu, a famished six-year-old from the Nishad community, is at a stretch of the Ken river in search of water. So shallow is the river bed that he attempts to drink directly from his mouth—like animals. Without much success. Kaalu has never been to school and roams about the whole day grazing domestic animals. The 427km Ken is a tributary of the Yamuna, flowing through Bundelkhand, a region straddling Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The Ken, considered the lifeline of Bundelkhand, has almost dried up and, at best, appears like a shallow muddy drain. In the neighbouring Mahoba district, in Bundelkhand, the Chandraval river has completely dried up, and so have 912 of the 1,385 ponds in the region.
Driving through the searing rural belts of Barmer and Jaisalmer, the border districts of Rajasthan, a shocking scene meets the eye: truckloads of carcasses of domestic cattle that have died because of lack of drinking water and pasture. Nine districts have been declared drought-hit in Rajasthan and seven in Bundelkhand. It is the same for the Sonbhadra district in the Vindhya region of Uttar Pradesh. Bhagirath Bishnoi, additional district magistrate of Jaisalmer, says 95 per cent of Jaisalmer is facing a drought. “As a result, the population has got so scattered that logistics is a major issue while providing fodder and water relief,” he says.
ALARM IN RAIN-FED STATES
In Maharashtra’s Beed district, groups of women are forced to descend as much as 40 feet into drying wells, scraping the bottom for leftover water. In Aurangabad district, a video gone viral shows two women desperately running behind a water truck, trying to collect water leaking from the tanker in their utensils. Rain-fed Maharashtra has declared 31 of its 37 districts drought-affected. All in all, only 7 per cent water remains in the state’s dams. In the worst-hit Marathwada region and northern Maharashtra, the dams are 99 per cent empty.
The situation is so alarming that about one-third of Maharashtra’s 120 million population faces severe water scarcity. The Devendra Fadnavis government in the state had launched a scheme in the name of late social activist Nanaji Deshmukh to provide farmers in 14 of the droughtaffected districts irrigation kits free of cost. The government also claims to have paid farmers Rs 5,000 crore in compensation for damaged crops. The electricity bills of farmers and students’ examination fees have been waived. Banks have been instructed not to forcefully make loan recoveries from farmers and issue fresh loans to those in need. The assembly election is due in Maharashtra in October.
In neighbouring Karnataka, another rain-fed state, 23 of the 30 districts, including Bengaluru Rural, have been officially declared drought-hit. Almost the entire state is in the grip of severe water scarcity. This includes six districts each in the Hyderabad-Karnataka and Bombay-Karnataka regions in the north, five districts in southern Karnataka, three districts of the Maidan region and two districts in the Malnad region. The water shortage is telling on some 2,200 villages as well as capital Bengaluru. The 13 major reservoirs in the state are running at only one-fifth of their capacity. Rabi crop production is down by 26 per cent. The Janata Dal (Secular)-Congress government estimates losses from the drought to be approximately Rs 32,335 crore. The state government has decided to extend the Rs 45,000 crore loan waiver for farmers announced in 2018 to the current year as well. Faced with this additional expenditure, the government has sought financial assistance from the Centre.
Such is the desperation that Karnataka water resources minister D.K. Shivakumar and minister for religious endowments P.T. Parameshwar Naik offered prayers at the Sri Rishya Shringeshwara Swamy temple in Sringeri on June 6 to appease the rain gods. The state government has also asked temples to spend a sum from their own funds to hold prayers for a good monsoon.
The situation is no better outside the rain-fed
regions. In Bihar, 23 out of 38 districts were declared droughtaffected in November 2018. Another district was added to the list in February. In Jharkhand, 18 out of 24 districts were declared drought-hit in November last year. Projections of droughtaffected districts for the coming year are made by respective state governments in November after the monsoon ends. However, these are often revised during the budget session and in emergency situations.
THE WORST IS AHEAD
The country’s western, southern and key northern states have been facing an unusually dry summer, with pre-monsoon showers, which usually come down between March and May, down to a drizzle, if at all. Jatin Singh, managing director of private weather agency Skymet, says: “This has been the second driest pre-monsoon season in the past 65 years, after the record lowest in 2012 when the cumulative rainfall was just 31 per cent of what had been expected.” With the exception of February this year, the entire period since July 2018 has been rain-deficient. In other words, 66 per cent of rainfall in the country in 2018-19 has been deficient or highly deficient.
In the west, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat are the worst affected, followed by Karnataka and Telangana in the south, Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh and parts of Jharkhand and Bihar. “It’s going to be a significantly deficient monsoon, with up to 7 per cent long period average (LPA) shortage. A shortage of another 3 per cent will certainly mean drought,” says Singh. “So far this year, the monsoon has been 45 per cent deficient. Any more deficiency in June and it will be difficult to recover.”
Skymet has issued an advisory against sowing crops for at least the next fortnight, warning that the onset of monsoon will be mild and its progress sluggish, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, northern Karnataka and central India.
The Central Water Commission (CWC) issued a drought advisory on May 18, calling for judicious use of water in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. A drought advisory is issued when water levels in the country’s reservoirs are 20 per cent less than the average of live water storage figures of the past decade. The advisory recommends that states restrict water use, as much as possible, to drinking purposes till the time the dams are replenished. The CWC monitors 91 major reservoirs in the country.
IN DENIAL MODE
In Telangana, official apathy has compounded the drought problem. “Nobody in the government is talking about the drought and water scarcity,” admits a senior state bureaucrat on condition of anonymity. “We call it the absence of water during the rabi season, when water sources go dry.” All India Kisan Sabha vice-president S. Malla Reddy claims the Telangana government chose not to declare drought in 310 of the 585 mandals facing a severe water crunch. “Had the state done so, it could have received central funds for drought-proofing the vulnerable areas and taking mitigation measures,” he says.
Naran Naik, a 38-year-old farmer holding five acres in Mogdumpur village of Warangal Rural district, couldn’t have agreed more. So precarious is the water supply that Naik has spent much of this summer digging his farm well another 20 feet, to 60 feet, in search of water. “There was little else I could do. The first crop of cotton during the kharif season was ruined by the pink bollworm pest; the second crop of maize yielded only 25 quintals per acre instead of the potential 50 quintals had there been copious supply of water,” he says.
With water-intensive crops, such as cotton, paddy and maize, accounting for 70 per cent of the total
cropped area in Telangana, the stress is showing. The predominantly rain-fed state is now trying to build massive irrigation projects, such as the Kaleshwaram project on the Godavari, to overcome the water crisis.
Although Union jal shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat claims that India’s dams have sufficient water and the fears of water scarcity are unfounded, the assertion flies in the face of a warning issued by the government’s own think-tank, the NITI Aayog. A research report flagged by the Aayog in June 2018 had warned: “India is going through the worst water crisis in its history. By 2020, 21 cities are expected to run out of groundwater resources. By 2030, the demand for water in the country will be twice the supply. This will result in water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people.” Shekhawat, however, commits to bringing tap water supply to every nook and corner of the country. “Tap water availability in India is only 18 per cent. We intend to make it 100 per cent by 2024,” he says, adding that the Centre is working on a plan to provide clean drinking water to nearly 140 million households.
Experts say the drought manual issued in 2016 by the BJP-led NDA government makes the process of declaring drought officially long and difficult. As a result, drought may go officially unannounced in many cases. This means relief measures, such as sufficient drinking water, subsidised diesel, electricity for irrigation, more days of insured work under MNREGA, are not taken up when needed the most. Instead of claiming that scarcity of water doesn’t exist in India, when facts point otherwise, it would be better for the government to admit the problem and give water conservation a serious push. Solutions like rainwater harvesting, catchment areas and building of dams need time-bound implementation so that the recurring water crisis can be mitigated, if not completely avoided.
SOLUTIONS LIKE DAMS, RAINWATER HARVESTING AND CATCHMENT AREAS NEED TIME-BOUND IMPLEMENTATION