Truth: Droughts are moneyspinners, but victims always helpless

Recurring droughts & enduring truth (The Hindu, June 1, 2000)


By Mahesh Vijapurkar

STARK IMAGES of dry landscapes, columns of women bringing home pots of drinking water from far-off places or empty pots lined up, cattle carcasses strewn around, evoke readers' and TV viewers' horror. These periodic bouts of graphic pictorials have resulted in little mitigation of a recurring crisis across the country. If they have been relatively absent in the last one decade, it is due to the good, blissfully long, unbroken cycle of plentiful rains. No credit to any State or, for that matter, the Centre for any work done in the intervening years.

Some pictures are piercingly poignant; some do not tell an accurate story. It is not uncommon for flayed animals to be left undisposed. After the vultures pick them clean, the village panchayats do not do their job and leave them around, a not uncommon rural sight. But a photographer cannot but take note of it when hungry, thirsty villagers index a drought using the first visible - to the urban reporter, the only understandable - benchmark. I recall a sarpanch in a village beyond Jodhpur saying how he ``misled'' a national fortnightly into believing that a pile of camel bones, accumulated over years, was the result of one bad year. That was 1983 in Solankiya Tala.

In the best of times, the ruralscapes of Barmer and Kutch are not going to provide a lot of greenery, certainly not in April and May when the desiccating winds and scorching sun take their toll. Even places around a well are going to be as barren in semi-arid and arid regions, but such pictures do tell a tale. After all, when a system fails to note the signals and April and May show up the unfolding implications such pictures have a purpose. But what should be asked is, if such areas have tanks with some water and women wait simply because electricity is not available to pump it up, who is responsible for aggravating fickle nature's impact? They are not being asked.

It does not take more funds - States demand more than they need, get less than they ask from the Centre, the reality is somewhere in between - to ensure that power is switched on at the right time so that women do not endure more hardships than required when scarce water is actually available? Does it need anything more than common sense to decide that if a drought was impending, a State (Gujarat in this case) should not sell its fodder cheap and wait for the distress to set in before importing at double the price from Punjab, tying up its strained manpower in avoidable tasks? Governments cannot wish, like people do, that droughts do not happen. They should prepare for it.Drought- proofing is difficult but could have been done. But the seeming insulation of the economy from droughts and their impact appears to have made those tasks less important. After all, what are a few disaster stories which will anyway disappear from newspapers when the monsoon washes the land with its plenty just weeks later? Chats with officials reveal their lurking respect for such stories because States are able to urge more relief from the Centre on that basis. Media hype helps.

The authorities will now spend lavishly, announcing big relief as succour to the thirsty and the jobless on the farms. But that will not prevent a scarcity in the future. Right now, two problems are to be squarely faced: 1) providing drinking water and 2) giving foodgrains either through food-for-work programmes or free distribution because the vulnerable do not have the resources to buy them even if available.

The experience of several droughts tells us that this round too will have its element of mismanagement, corruption, inadequacy and dissatisfaction. Each and every drought past has left its tell-tale, even grotesque, imprint. This correspondent remembers how in the early 80s, officialdom in Rayalaseema had perfected a system to cream off more than was provided. It seems quite improbable - even mathematically impossible - but it was done. There is a report written by an Executive Engineer, a DSP and a Revenue Official on how this was accomplished: jungle clearance where no blade of grass could grow, procurement of cement for sale at rates that shamed the blackmarket then prevailing. Plus the corpus itself.

This report should be available in the Government archives. What was done with it is not known. But work to be done was grossly overestimated at inflated rates and under-executed. All this points to not just the contractors' perfidy but official connivance. In drought relief, no payments are generally made unless Collectors certify. Even if all officials are not to be - and cannot be - painted with the same brush, petty officials at lower rungs have their own way of overcoming the best of supervision. After all, a drought is when crops fail and officialdom harvests gains by shortchanging the ``beneficiaries''.

But there are some generic issues that should be addressed. The frequency of droughts has actually generated even new linguistics. In Rajasthan, droughts are so frequent that the word ``famine'' too has gone into the rural vocabulary even when the official lexicon prefers ``drought'' - there is a qualitative difference between the two words. Famine speaks of unspeakable hardships, with no access to foodgrains. Drought is only scarcity because foodgrains can be moved and people can access them. Provided, of course, they have the money to spend on it because of the precarious employment opportunities and vast under- employment and under-payment that is more a practice than exception in rural areas.

It took quite sometime for this correspondent to understand the difference sought to be conveyed by residents of village after village on a trip to the Jodhpur region in 1984. The drought, they said, was bad in that it had laid waste their agrarian economy that coped with paltry production in adverse conditions but the ``Famine, saab, has been good''. It needed an IAS official in the comfort of his palatial bungalow to make things clear. The year was bad, but the work done under what the villagers thought was a Famine Relief Code was good. They just dropped the other two words.

Saurashtra and Kutch, a region known for charity and community concerns, see a system of cattle camp management where distressed farmers can leave their cattle behind at camps run by the village mahajans who are actually traders. They are dutifully tended, with no return in terms of milk yield. When a farmer wants to take them back with the advent of a hopeful monsoon, he has to pay for it. So even charity has a price. But this is glossed over.

And the cake is taken by what happened in 1977 in Warangal. When the Zilla Parishad discussed drought relief, each of the non- officials wanted as much as could be made available for their own constituencies, regardless of the intensity of the drought impact in that region of Telangana. An exasperated District Collector, know more for his soft-spoken words which had the impact of a sledge-hammer, quietly told them: this was a drought relief fund and not a booty to be distributed to the most demanding. The result: the well-meaning Collector's transfer was sought. But he stayed on, underscoring a simple fact - the people matter. Someone in Hyderabad realised the truth. But each year, it seems, the future will reveal more of such images. The truth: droughts are here to stay till prevention, not post-crisis management, becomes the norm.