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dam-l LS: Gujarat Drought a Government Made-Disaster
Source: Indian Express, April 26, 2000
Catch the rain
Anil Agarwal
During one of the meetings of the World Water
Commission, which recently submitted its report in the Hague to a bevy
of water ministers, a member had strongly emphasised the need for educating
politicians about the importance of water. I, however, found that
argument incorrect because I have rarely met a politician, especially in
India, who will not emphasise the importance of water. The real problem is
that hardly any of them know how to solve the water problem. Teaching
them that is a much more difficult task.
Remember Chandrashekhar and his Bharat Yatra? The most
important thing on his development agenda after he completed his
marathon was water. Read Atal Behari Vajpayee's address to the
Parliament on NDA's action plan for the nation. Vajpayee says that if
there is one thing he is going to do in five years of his rule is to ensure
that all villages will get drinking water. Rajiv Gandhi actually set up a
drinking water mission.
Many will term what is happening in Gujarat and
Rajasthan a ``natural disaster''. But this is really far from the truth. It
is a ``government-made'' disaster. Over the last hundred years or so, we have
seen two paradigm shifts in water management. One is that individuals
and communities have steadily given over their role almost completely to
the State. The second is that the simple technology of using rainwater has
declined. Instead exploitation of rivers and groundwater through dams
and tubewells has become the key source of water. As water in rivers and
aquifers is only a small portion of the total rainwater availability,
there is an inevitable, growing and, often, unbearable stress on these
sources. This dependence on the state has meant cost recovery being poor -- the
financial sustainability of water schemes running aground.
With people having no interest in using water
carefully, the sustainability of water resources has itself become a
question mark.
As a result, there are serious problems with government drinking water
supply schemes. Despite all the government efforts, the number of
``problem villages'' does not seem to go down. As N.C. Saxena, former rural
development secretary, put it recently, ``In our mathematics,
200,000 problem villages minus 200,000 problem villages is still 200,000
problem villages.''
Community-based rainwater harvesting the paradigm of
the past has in it as much strength today as it ever did before. A survey
conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) of several
villages facing drought in Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh last
December found that ll those villages that had undertaken rainwater
harvesting or watershed development in earlier years had no drinking water
problem and even had some water to irrigate their crops. On the other hand,
neighbouring villages were desperate for water and people here were planning
to migrate when the real summer hit them. The survey revealed that
rainwater harvesting can meet even the acid test of a bad drought.
In late March, we got further confirmation of our
conviction. Going with President K.R. Narayanan in a helicopter to the Arvari
watershed where he was scheduled to give the Down to Earth-Joseph C. John
Award to village Bhaonta-Kolyala in late March, we could see nothing
but barren fields all the way from Delhi to Alwar. This area is suffering
from a second consecutive drought-year. But suddenly we came across
green and brown fields and realised that we had reached the oasis of
the Arvari watershed where several villages have, over the last five to ten
years, built hundreds of rainwater harvesting structures. Nobody needed to
emphasise the importance of rainwater harvesting any more. The
President saw a more or less dead Arvari river, unable to withstand the burden
of two years' drought, but wells still full of water and, therefore,
villagers reasonably happy.
What makes rainwater harvesting such a powerful
technology? Ju-st the simple richness of rainwater availability that few of
us realise because of the speed with which water, the world's most fluid
substance, disappears. Imagine you had a hectare of land in Barmer, one of
India's driest places, and you received 100 mm of water in the year, common
even for this area. That means that you received as much as one million
litres of water enough to meet drinking and cooking water needs of 182
people at a liberal 15 litres per day. Even in the villages
suffering from drought this year, it is not as if there was no rain. Saurashtra
villages, the worst affected, also had 100-300 mm rainfall but they let
the water go. It does not matter how much rain you get if you don't capture
it. Cheerapunji, with 11,000 mm annual rainfall, also suffers from drinking
water shortages.
I have consistently argued that there is no village in
India that cannot meet its basic drinking and cooking needs thr-ough
rainwater harvesting. Figures sp-eak for themselves. The average population
of an Indian village today is about 1,200. India's average annual rainfall
is about 1,100 mm. If even only half this water can be captured, an average
Indian village needs 1.2 hectares of land to capture 6.57 million litres of
water it will use in a year for cooking and drinking. If there is a drought
and rainfall levels dip to half the normal, the land required would rise to a
mere 2.4 hectare.
The experience of villages like Suk-homajri, Ralegan
Siddhi and several villages in Alwar district has further shown that
rainwater harvesting can, in fact, become the starting point to
eradicate rural
poverty itself. Assured water availability means increased and stable
agricultural production and improved animal care. Rainwater
harvesting has helped
Ralegan Siddhi transform itself from one of the most destitute
villages of the country in the 1970s to one of the richest today.
If it all makes so much sense then why is this
paradigm not accepted by the government and replicated everywhere? The problem
is really mind-sets. Rainwater harvesting demands a new approach
to governance itself a participatory form of governance rather than
a top-down, bureaucratic one. Politicians have created a culture
of dependence on the government. Given this political mind-set, the water
bureaucracy, too, has a culture of providing services, howsoever poor they
may be, rather than one of empowering people to develop their own water
supplies. And it is still locked into the big dam, pumps, pipes and
borewell paradigm.
To provide lasting relief against drought the
government will need to go beyond promises. It should prepare a
concrete plan of
action to develop a mass movement for water harvesting.
The writer was a member of the World Water Commission