Devinder Sharma

Food and agriculture policy analyst

Perspective

Drought in India

For the third year in a row, monsoon rains have failed over the arid regions of Rajasthan in northwest India. In the adjoining Saurashtra region of Gujarat, the situation is no better. And far away, in western Orissa, which has still to recover from the shock of the super cyclone that struck in all its devastating fury a year ago, villagers pray for the rains to wash away their sorrows.

While parts of Orissa suffer from drought, heavy rains and incessant floods have deluged a significant proportion of the neighbouring state of West Bengal. The weather gods have certainly been playing truant and have remained unkind to millions of inhabitants primarily in the rainfed regions of India. As the poor continue to suffer, the recurring phenomenon of drought and floods, often in the same regions, has, however, become a lucrative business for the policy makers, donors and the contractors.

After all, drought and floods is all about watershed management. Knowing well that conserving water and soil erosion through management is the key to rain fed farming, the Ministry of Agriculture had embarked upon an integrated watershed development programme in the early 1980s. And if still, twenty years later, a severe drought ravages through parts of the western and central India, there must be something inherently wrong with the technique to harvest rainwater and also in managing the hilly catchments.

Instead of using traditional techniques for watershed management, the Ministry of Agriculture adopted an alien technology, from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States. And, as tends to happen with any imported technology, which is thrust upon the people, this "ridge to valley" watershed management was also destined to fail. And it did, in the process draining the national exchequer by an estimated Rs 160,000 million and leaving a trail of socio-economic crises in the rural areas and subsequently in the urban centres too.

During the past two decades, I have visited a large number of watersheds throughout the country. And invariably, it turns out to be a disappointment to see the way money has, literally, been allowed to be washed down the slopes. At most of the places, the contour bunds have given way, the rock fill structures are broken and more often than not the check dam has been constructed at a wrong place. The underlying message is clear: India needs to re-discover the time tested traditional technologies and systems to conserve water.

The answer, therefore, lies in rejuvenation of the existing ponds, tanks and traditional water harvesting structures. In southern India, for instance, a strategy that is widely recommended is to reactivate some 200,000 existing ponds into recharge tanks. In Tamil Nadu, an NGO has recharged some 20,000 tanks. Two of the spiritual Hindu oganisations (Swadhyaya Parivar and Swaminarayana Sampradaya) have revived and modified some 300,000 wells in western India. A number of other NGOs and individuals have also worked relentlessly on reviving the existing ponds, and thereby recharging the groundwater level.

Some village communities in Alwar in Rajasthan had earlier decided to take the massive task of water harvesting in their own hands. Several years later, these people have been able to revive five dead rivers. Instead of going by the textbook, the community inadvertently took the reverse route, working from "valley" to the "ridge". They began by reviving the village ponds and tanks in the first step, and then moving upwards and upstream. At no stage did the villagers asked for "expert" advice from foresters and rural development officials.

And yet, Rajasthan continues to ignore the message that comes from Alwar. It has instead launched a massive watershed management programme based on the imported technology. Gujarat and Orissa too have paid but lip service to the traditional water harvesting structures. The result is that, a year after the worst drought in recent memory hit parts of the country, the nation is once again as vulnerable to natural calamities as it was before.

"GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair" and "In the Famine Trap" are among the works recently written by Devinder Sharma