Month: July 2019

Decades of neglect in rightly managing our fresh water resources, which in any case are quite tight considering its multipurpose uses, including supporting agricultural operation and quenching the thirst of over 1.3 billion, is now spelling untold miseries to millions across the country as it poses a threat to India’s ambitious growth targets.

Drought having gripped 43 per cent of the country and the monsoon deficit still at 17 per cent, thanks to some strong rains in the north but masking the persistent rains shortfall in the south, a large percentage of population is having a nightmarish existence. The government machinery as usual is found wanting in providing relief to people living in parched parts of our earth.

The principal culprit for the current state of affairs is unarguably the indiscriminate way we have been extracting groundwater and in the process earning the dubious distinction of being the world’s most aggressive miner of the precious resource. To put it in perspective, India’s groundwater extraction exceeds the combined tally of the world’s second and third largest users, namely, China and the US.

India is home to 17 per cent of the world population but has to make do with 4 per cent of the earth’s fresh water. China, which houses more than a fifth of the world population, has only 7 per cent of its fresh water. It, however, faces the perennial challenge of meeting minimum water requirements of North China plains where close to 42 per cent of the country’s population lives but holds only 8 per cent of its water resource.

Like China, the US owns 7 per cent of the world fresh water. But it has the advantage of being home to 4.3 per cent of world population. No wonder, the US indulges in the luxury of leaving an average water footprint that is double the global average. No matter that the country owns the world’s largest fresh water lake system in the world in its Great Lakes and the mighty Mississippi river, the importance of conservation and efficiency in use for future security in water supply is not lost on the US Administration. Incidentally, water is one of the seven science missions of the US Geological Survey.

We in India are sourcing over 70 per cent of our water requirements from below the surface drilling aquifers at progressively greater depths without leaving adequate time for natural replenishment. Mihir Shah, a former member of the defunct Planning Commission says: “Over the last four decades, around 84 per cent addition to the irrigated area came from groundwater. Most of this was from deep drilling of tubewells or borewells, which are the single largest source of irrigation as also drinking water, in both rural and urban India.”

Going deeper and deeper the aquifers for water extraction has meant our mining the resource in a growing number of places where the water comes with unacceptable levels of fluoride, arsenic and iron. Use of such water leaves people with serious bone deformities and lung and bladder cancer. Extraction of groundwater at levels where the resource found is polluted and its use results in the government spending millions for treatment of the diseased.

A major failing of our hydrological planning is not conserving enough water for offseason that is beyond the monsoon months. Even after we have built a few thousand large and small dams in different parts of the country, our per capita storage of 215 cubic metre (CM) compares unfavourably with 1,111 CM in China and 1,964 CM in the US. In water conservation, Russia’s per capita tally at 6,103 is way ahead of other countries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first monthly radio broadcast programme ‘Mann ki Bat’ after winning the elections reminded the water hungry listeners that “only 8 per cent of all rain water in India is conserved… It’s now time to solve the problem” by giving a push to greater grassroots water conservation efforts. What the PM has proposed now should have actually been implemented in past years with great force. Maybe the administration is awakened to the situation now because of the spectre of millions of people in drought affected parts of the country are driven to the edge and food production is to take a hammering. The latter is because more than half of the country’s arable land is rain-fed. India receives around 70 per cent of rains during the southwest monsoon beginning in June and petering out in mid-September.

What India must be geared to is the weakening monsoon in South Asia caused by climate change. Rains in the region were below average for five years in a row, with 2015 being the worst at 86 per cent. Think tank Niti Aayog says in a report that the country faces the harrowing prospect of 40 per cent of its people not having access to drinking water by 2030.

Furthermore, at least 21 cities, including the national capital will run out of groundwater in 2020.  Hospitals in southern Indian states finding piped water supply gone dry are getting it for the time being from local politicians owned fleets of water tankers at usurious rates. But this source of water may also run dry and too soon.

In Delhi, less than one fifth of homes have the luxury of piped water supply. In a growing number of places, whatever groundwater is extracted comes with chemicals and other contaminants. It is in the context of tightening water supply is to be seen Modi’s promise of delivering piped water to every home by 2024. As things are now, there is every chance of this post election victory promise remaining unfulfilled as his earlier commitment to create 10 million jobs every year.

Veena Srinivasan of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment will attribute the deteriorating water scene in the country to “multiple causes, both climate and anthropogenic… Of course, the drought itself is caused by a deficit in precipitation and climate change certainly has something to do with the changing precipitation patterns. But… we can’t absolve ourselves from the crisis that we ourselves have precipitated with mismanagement, and specifically by over-extracting groundwater.” She thinks Green Revolution gave licence to millions of farmers to use groundwater without limits to “rise out of poverty.”

The fact is when in the beginning of the sixties India was plunged in a major food crisis, Norman Borlaug and his prescription for breakthrough in rice and wheat productivity not only made the country self-reliant in food but also generated surplus for exports. Remember when Green Revolution was launched, the awareness of water conservation was hardly there in India or for that matter anywhere else. In subsequent times, however, the administration in Punjab and Haryana should have discouraged water guzzling rice cultivation in favour of less water using crops. In any case, the present crisis could have been avoided by the local government disallowing indiscriminate exploitation of underground water.

Farm and allied sector’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) has come down over the years to less than 15 per cent while it accounts for over 90 per cent of total water use. Again nearly 90 per cent of extracted groundwater is used in irrigation. But as Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant says water use efficiency in our farm sector is among the lowest in the world. He says: “Our farmers use three to five times more water than Chinese, Israeli and American farmers for producing the same crop.” The remedy prescribes by Kant is to motivate farmers to “adopt cropping patterns based on agro-climatic zoning” to economise on water use. At the same time, radical modification of “subsidies and minimum support price” is needed to “disincentivise farmers from growing water intensive crops.”

Om Prakash Dhanuka, a former president of Indian Sugar Mills Association and a Bihar based producer of sugar, sees no justification of growing highly water-intensive sugarcane in parts of the country, which are highly drought prone and perennially short of water. Because of our surplus sugar production, we are desperate to export large quantities to wriggle out of price falls in the domestic market. But we must remember that when we are exporting sugar or rice, we are also exporting water.

Dhanuka, however, says: “It’s not all despair. For example, at Hiware Bazar village in Maharashtra, the community of farmers is opting out of sugarcane and cotton growing for less water-intensive crops. Farmers are not allowing any more digging of borewells and they are practising water management on scientific lines. We are also seeing similar farmer initiative in Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. Water management will have to be a nationwide movement in which the government, scientists and farmer community must participate wholeheartedly.”

As Congress members make a beeline for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka to Goa, the election-bound state of Maharashtra is proving to be no exception. With less than three months to go for the assembly polls, cadres from both the Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party are scouting around for greener pastures and the BJP is proving to their preferred choice given that the saffron party is on the ascendant in this western state. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance enjoys a massive majority in the assembly and, more recently, it swept the Lok Sabha polls.

What is particularly galling for the Congress-NCP alliance is the erosion in its support base as Dalits, backward classes, upper castes and, now even the dominant Maratha community, have shifted allegiance to the BJP.

The BJP’s success in winning over the Marathas follows the concerted efforts made by the saffron party over the last five years to reach out to them. The party’s focus on the Maratha community is understandable as it comprises nearly one-third of the population in the state and has always wielded strong political influence. Unlike Haryana where the BJP chose to ignore the dominant Jat community and consolidated the non-Jat vote, in Maharashtra the BJP strategized to win over the influential Marathas.

The BJP has been working on various fronts simultaneously to wean away the Marathas from the Congress-NCP alliance. The saffron camp worked hard to weaken the influence of the Marathas over the bank, sugar and milk cooperatives in the state. While draining them economically, the BJP made a special effort to touch base with the influential Maratha leaders in the Congress and the NCP, persuading many local leaders to switch sides. For instance, the Congress was dealt a severe blow on the eve of Lok Sabha elections when the leader of its legislative party Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil and several others joined the BJP. The NCP also suffered a similar fate.

Then again, the saffron camp moved quickly on the demand for including the Marathas in backward class category to enable its members to avail quotas in government jobs and educational institutions. At the one stage, it appeared that the state-wide protests by the Marathas for reservations would spiral out of control and hurt the BJP’s electoral prospects. But Maharashtra chief minister Devender Fadnavis, under the guidance of BJP president Amit Shah, managed to snuff out the protests. They first identified the local leaders in districts who were spearheading this stir and then proceeded to give them tickets and positions to soften them. At the same time, it worked on meeting the Marathas demand for quotas.

The project, which began in 2014 when Fadnavis asked the State Backward Class Commission for a report detailing the extent of the social and economic backwardness of the Marathas, eventually culminated in the enactment of a law providing 16 percent quota for Marathas.

The BJP government got a shot in the arm when its move was endorsed by the Bombay High Court earlier this year though the quota was slashed down to 12 percent. The decision has since been challenged in the Supreme Court on the ground that this quota exceeds the 50 percent ceiling on reservations laid down by the apex court. The matter will come up for its next hearing later this month. The BJP is encouraged by the fact that the Supreme Court has not stayed the High Court order though it has ruled against its retrospective implementation. In fact, the saffron party is not worried about its decision being struck down as it believes it has succeeded in sending out the message that the Fadnavis government is indeed serious about providing quotas to Marathas and has been working in that direction for the last five years.

This effort is held out in sharp contrast to the previous Congress-NCP government’s decision on quotas which was struck down by the courts. The BJP also tom-toms the fact that a Brahmin chief minister has swung this deal while earlier Maratha leaders had failed to deliver on the long-pending demand. In fact, when the BJP appointed a Brahmin as chief minister, it was believed that he would fail as Maharashtra has traditionally always had a Maratha chief minister, But Fadnavis has proved his critics wrong and like his Haryana counterpart, has managed to hold his own and got widespread acceptance.

Having already won over the other castes, the BJP’s success in winning over the Marathas has underlined its dominant position in Maharashtra. Together with its partner, the Shiv Sena, this alliance looks set to continue its winning streak in the coming assembly elections. Coming a few months after its massive victory in the Lok Sabha polls, the momentum remains in favour of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. Besides getting its caste arithmetic right, the saffron camp also has the advantage of the strong religious polarization witnessed in the general election. The same sentiment will prevail in the October state polls.

“We are comfortably placed in Maharashtra. We have a strong party organization, our alliance with the Shiv Sena is on track and, more importantly, there is no anti-incumbency against our governmen,” a senior BJP leader told Lokmarg.    

On the other hand, a demoralized Congress and NCP is in disarray. Not only has it lost its support base, but the Congress organization is also weak and faction-ridden. The leadership vacuum at the center, following Rahul Gandhi’s decision to step down as Congress president, has added to the party’s woes. The grand old party has a serious problem at hand as there is no visible or immediate let-up in the overriding anti-Congress mood. “Anti-Congressism has now become an ideology,” bemoaned a party leader.