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GUJARAT
A Lifeless Landscape
The state has been through worse. But the real worry this
time is the drastic depletion of the water table in Saurashtra and the
north
By Uday
Mahurkar
 The
pain is writ large on Ratna Ahir's face. It's the pain of a flourishing
farmer who has been reduced to a labourer, the pain of a man wondering how
it all went wrong. A poor monsoon ensured that his 40 acre of cumin crop
in drought-affected Vauva village of Patan district in north Gujarat
yielded nothing. He now digs ponds and builds bunds on a government relief
site but the Rs 2,500 his family makes a month -- down from Rs 12,000 --
is barely enough to support the seven-member unit.
ANDHRA
PRADESH
DYING Hopes |
| Their
crops and livestock destroyed by the scorching heat, debt-ridden
farmers seek refuge in death
After
driving for hours through the unsparing heat, Patha Jangamayapalli
village in Mahbubnagar district south of Hyderabad comes across as
an oasis in a land wracked by drought. It showcases a new
direction for sustainable farming in the drylands. The water that
is pumped up from a deep bore well in the bed of the dry Sarala
Sagar skirting the village is used judiciously to irrigate the 80
acres under cultivation. The villagers grow sweet lime, guava and
papaya, each of the 60-odd families making at least Rs 10,000 a
month.
Not everyone treats this precious common resource with so much
care. A few kilometres away, Kanmetta village is paying a heavy
price for the profligacy with which its residents have used the
ground water. The stream that used to feed the village has dried
up. So has the village water tank and the two open wells in the
village. A farmer, G. Venkat Reddy shows the fields where paddy
and sorghum were sown last year only to be destroyed by the
drought. "The fluctuation in power supply burnt up the motor
so we couldn't pump water up," he says.
It may not have made any difference since the water table in the
region has dropped drastically in the past one year. The drought
has affected 18 of the 23 districts in Andhra Pradesh, sending the
rural economy into a tailspin. The Government estimates that the
farm sector lost Rs 2,556 crore. It has declared 17,431 villages
as drought hit. But drinking water is being transported to only
1,400 of these villages. The others have been forced to fend for
themselves.
The falling ground water table made desperate villagers throw
caution to the winds. In Palem village, Lakshmiamma, 32, is lying
dazed on a cot under a tree, unmindful of the oppressive heat of
the Andhra summer. She is yet to recover from the shock of losing
her 10-year-old daughter to gastroenteritis a few weeks ago.
Lakshmi took ill after she drank contaminated water. Lakshmiamma
and her husband Ramulu, an unskilled labourer, dug into their
meagre savings for her treatment but could not save her.
The cavalcade of misery is never-ending. The drought has wreaked
havoc on crops, throwing farmers into a debt trap. In Gangapuram
village of Mahbubnagar district alone there have been five
drought-related deaths. Seetharam Reddy, 45, drank pesticide to
quench the despair that came from mounting dues and a destroyed
cotton crop. G. Shivaiah, 40, also sought refuge in death after he
could not repay the Rs 21,000 he had borrowed for his daughter's
marriage.
Farmers who have learnt to face the vagaries of nature do not lose
heart easily. But the continuing drought, the exorbitant rates of
interest charged by private moneylenders, and the insensitivity of
the administration seems to have dried up their hopes this time
round.
-Amarnath K.
Menon
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Besides his two sons, his wife Saviben
too pitches in -- that's if she is not running chores for the house and
more importantly, waiting for water. The lifeline tanker that comes to the
village has no fixed time, and after what seems like an endless wait, she
gets 150 litres of water a day. That's a generous deal by drought
standards but it is nowhere near enough -- her three buffaloes alone need
120 litres. "We go without a bath for days, and have barely enough to
drink," she says. "It's only will power that is sustaining
us."
As it perhaps is in the other
drought-affected zones of Gujarat. This includes over 9,400 villages of 17
districts, mainly in Saurashtra and the north. Scorching sun, barren land,
empty wells and ponds, carcasses strewn everywhere -- that's the sort of
landscape the lesser mortals of these areas have come to identify
themselves with. In Kapileshwar village of Banaskantha district in north
Gujarat it's the mute cattle whose agony is evident. A herd of some 1,400
heads surges ahead in the hope of getting a handful of grass that a
panjrapole -- traditional cattle camp -- worker waves in his hands. And
hovering above are vultures and kites, knowing each day will bring a
couple of more corpses to feed upon.
The starkness of it all is striking. All
except seven of the 147 big and medium dams in Saurashtra have gone dry
besides 24 more in north Gujarat. Union Minister of State for Water
Resources C.P. Thakur couldn't help wondering "whether it is a dam or
a furnace" when he recently visited one of the cracked dams in
Saurashtra. There have been three drought-related human deaths so far --
one of them due to dehydration at a relief site -- the livestock toll
beyond count. Even well-to-do farmers like Ahir sweat it out as labourers
on the relief sites while their women, pitchers in hand, sit huddled in
hundreds waiting for that elusive drop of water that is supplied through a
tanker or a pipeline. And when it finally trickles, there is every
possibility of a riot breaking out, as it has in Rajkot and Bhavnagar.
"My children have contracted skin
diseases because we cannot have a bath," wails Jyotsna Ahir, a
resident of Bhagwatipura in Rajkot after a hard jostle to get her potful.
"The little water we get is not enough for drinking itself."
This has meant a business opportunity for some in the town, where water
worth Rs 1.5 lakh is sold each day. The going rate: Rs 40 per 1,000 litres.
In the villages, however, water makes
little business sense. Simply because there is no money to buy. Bhagwan
Koli of Jodia village in Surendranagar district, once a farm labourer,
found himself jobless overnight when the employer himself ended up at a
relief site. Though moneylenders are hard to come by, Koli managed to get
a loan of Rs 4,000 but its repayment at a monthly interest rate of 2 per
cent is weighing on him. He has also started work on a relief site but
that's hardly any consolation. "Look at my plight," he urges.
"It's a no-win situation where the money I earn will barely help
repay my debt and buy food." Let alone water.
It's the same sparseness that sees women
in Jamsar village of Jamnagar district walk over 2 km each day -- only to
get brackish drinking water from the bed of a rivulet. Their ordeal began
when piped water supply suddenly stopped. The authorities insist that it
is a distributional snag but the truth lies elsewhere.
The search for water is getting more
desperate and with it the water table in Saurashtra and north Gujarat is
depleting at a frightening pace. That's what makes this year's drought
worse than the previous ones in 1986-88. In north Gujarat, the level of
water has come down to 1,500 ft while in Saurashtra it is 500 ft. This has
been the result of reckless and excessive drawing of water by farmers for
agricultural use. Over a lakh borewells have been sunk in these areas in
the past decade alone. "It's partially a man-made crisis that has led
to a permanent drought-like situation," says Darshini Mahadevia of
the Ahmedabad-based Centre for Environment and Planning. "The awesome
task of recharging the water table and tapping the surface water to an
optimum level has to be taken." Awesome but not impossible.
MP
AND UP
CURSE OF Vindhyas |
| Women
scoop up muddy water from a drying well and use cloth to filter it
At the
stroke of midnight, women of Gopipura village abandon their husbands
and children in their thatched huts and start trooping out. Armed
with earthen pitchers, a long rope and a bucket, they trudge 5 km to
reach a well -- the only source of water for Gopipura and other
neighbouring hamlets in this rocky terrain of Chitrakoot district in
the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. On reaching their
destination, the women, mostly belonging to the backward and
Scheduled Castes, lie down with the vessels beside them and wait for
dawn to see if water has collected in the well.
Like all other
sources -- rivulets, check dams and ponds -- water has evaporated
from this well too. Sometime in the night water seeps in from a
stream underground. The women scoop up the muddy trickle and trek
back home to filter it with a piece of cloth. Their morning chores
done, they set off again for the well, this time in the blazing sun.
Acute water scarcity has triggered migration of animals in the
region -- to greener pastures nearly 60 km away.
In the adjoining
Cheria village under Manikpur sub-tehsil, government-installed
handpumps have been rusting for the past six months. The only
functional handpump is 6 km away. The crisis along the Vindhyas is
playing havoc with the Dalits. As Munna Dom (a sweeper by caste)
says, they are dying of thirst and the Brahmins and Ahirs are
depriving them of water from the choharas -- small 5-ft deep pits
dug all along the banks of dry rivulets, ponds and nullahs -- which
are the only source of water for man and beast in the region.
Water crisis is not
new to Bundelkhand. The rocky and sloping terrain can't store rain
water. Way back in 1935, so moved was the British Water Commission
that it recommended eviction of the entire population. population
has grown 10-fold since then, and water as remote as ever. Nearly 90
per cent of the 250 check dams have been washed away, and the rest
dry up even before the onset of summer. In 1973, with much fanfare
Indira Gandhi launched the Rs 100-crore World Bank-aided Patha
(meaning rocky) Water Scheme. Barring the upper fringes of the
hills, the water tanks and pipelines went to seed long ago. Then
came the hundreds of handpumps, courtesy the World Bank. But with
the water table falling, the handpumps stick out as sore thumbs.
Water crisis has given birth to a saying in the region: "Gagri
na phute, chahe khasam mari jaaye (O God, the earthen pitcher on my
head should not fall, even if my husband dies at home).
-Subhash Mishra
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