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Water woes

Kuldip Nayar

SOMEWHAT belatedly, the Centre has woken up to the dry spell in the country. The matter came up the other day before the Union Cabinet. There were several voices of concern. Consequently, the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, constituted a committ ee of Cabinet Ministers to find out the territories facing the scarcity.

The objective is to estimate the loss and to prepare some schemes for assistance. In a way, it is the implementation of the recommendations made by the last Finance Commission. It wanted the creation of a separate cell, with a separate allocation, to dea l with such national disasters as earthquakes, floods and drought. The Prime Minister has, no doubt, set the ball rolling. But little purpose will be served if the cell is located in the Planning Commission, as the announcement says. It should be in the Prime Minister's Secretariat for a better coordination.

``Indeed, some States have suffered a lot,'' Mr Vajpayee said a few days ago when I met him at his residence. When we discussed the failure of the rains in certain parts, he said that water shortage would be the ``real problem'' next year. He gave me the impression that the problem was far more serious than people realised.

Indeed, water is the world's problem. At a recent UN convention, water was considered a point over which future wars might be fought. That Mr Vajpayee has taken the initiative is clear. But why the Planning Commission, the Agriculture Ministry or the oth er government outfits have been negligent in taking action? Some States have been vainly complaining to the Centre about drought for many months. The plan for Central assistance to a few States is many years old. Why was there no action? Did politics com e in the way? At least this is the complaint of Rajasthan, one of the worst-affected States.

It is apparent that the Prime Minister has not been able to convey the gravity of the situation, either to his Government or to the country. The drought in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, in that order, is so appalling that the Centre has to mobil ise all its resources to bail them out. Four districts of Madhya Pradesh are also in dire straits. The press probably does not want to create an alarm. Were it to tell the story candidly, the nation would be shocked to know how timid and half-hearted the official effort has been.

What has happened is that the Government never assessed the problem realistically. Official reports admit that the ``projects planned and executed in the beginning were based on inadequate data and some of the storage schemes (for water) have not been ab le to achieve the full design, live storage in 75 per cent or even 90 per cent of the period earmarked.'' The National Council of Applied Economic Research records that only 34.7 per cent of farmers have 50 per cent of their gross crop area under irrigat ion and 52 per cent of villages depend on unprotected (or unsafe) sources of water.

No doubt, there has been complacency about water management. There was no national water policy for nearly 35 years after Independence. When the programme was launched in 1981, it was declared that the entire population, both urban and rural, would be co vered under the scheme of International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, that is, by 1991. By then the urban areas did not do so badly; 72 per cent of the population benefited, but the rural programme was a disaster. Only 31 per cent did get drinking water. No real progress has been made since.

The rural areas remain neglected even today, though on paper, much of the water demand has been met. The targets have been reached, on books, but the reality is entirely different. Figures have been cooked up and a substantial part of allocations has bee n siphoned off. Both bureaucrats and politicians are partners in this. When Mr Y. K. Alagh was Planning Minister, he constituted the Blue Ribbon Commission, which gave its report in 1996-97. It gave an optimistic estimate: The population in 2050 would ha ve the water India needed. But the rider was the country would have to do a lot of things. Unfortunately, they have not been done. The Commission's chairman warned that if there was slackness, the country would be short of water by 25 per cent. Mr Alagh says: ``The drinking water problem more often than not, is a problem of access rather than availability. In spite of the national water policy giving it a top priority, water is provided for industrial and urban use and when available for drinking, it is not for the poorest.''

A lot of blame can be pinned on large dams. The beel, jheel and talab, built in the past to store water, have been neglected or destroyed because of the independent India's obsession with big dams. Apart from the rehabilitation problem of the displaced, the phobia of dams has destroyed natural and cheaper ways of storing water. The entire policy of irrigation needs to be reviewed. The finest dams with a lousy delivery system do not make sense. Nor do dams which destroy ecology, environment and uproot la khs of people. Moreover, in the next 10 years, the cropping intensity, which depends on efficient water use, will have to be improved more than in the past 25 years. Hopefully, there will be no big dams any more.

In the midst of finding water for fields, New Delhi is not conscious of the large-scale water pollution in the country. A couple of years ago, a top foreign expert found groundwater contamination in India among the worst in the world. He gave a number of reasons: ``India's geology: It is basically a flat country. That means the groundwater in much of the country is very close to the surface. So, it is easily contaminated.''

But that is another story.