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Why Rs 86,500 crore allocated for irrigation will do little to help Maharashtra's farmers

Of the 46 AIBP projects prioritised in the Union budget, 13 are in Maharastra.

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Unused canal part of Tillari Interstate Project.
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Rs 86,500 crores! That’s as much of your taxes will spent over the next five years for Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Projects (AIBP) with over Rs 17,000 crores being spent in 2016-17 itself. Water rights activists have raised an alarm over this since these are the same projects that the BJP targeted while in the opposition. “The scheme started by P Chidambaram in 1996 in two decades did not deliver any irrigation. What it did was create huge bank balances for contractors, engineers, bureaucrats and hand-in-glove politicians,” points out activist Parineeta Dandekar of the South Asia Network For Dams Rivers and People (SANDRP).  “CAG reports have repeatedly highlighted this reality, especially in case of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and now possibly Madhya Pradesh. In fact, this was the very plank on which BJP came to power in Maharashtra,” she adds and asks, “Wonder why Union Finance Minister (FM) Arun Jaitley is treading the same path?”
 
Of the 89 AIBP Projects, 13 of the biggest money-guzzlers come from Maharashtra (which has not only made headlines for the massive Rs 36,000 crore irrigation scam but also ended up bringing the NCP under a cloud for its role in the scam) which now has a BJP Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis. The CM told the state Assembly on July 21, 2015: “We have built large dams everywhere without thinking of feasibility or water availability.” He added, “Large Dams are not the road ahead”. In fact, he wisely delinked large dams from actual irrigation and observed: “We pushed large dams, not irrigation, this has to change.”
 
The same equitable water rights groups like SANDRP who were all praise for Fadnavis’ spearheading a hugely successful focus on small-scale interventions for harvesting and recharging water through the Jal Yukta Shivar Yojana, are now questioning why Jaitley’s financial thrust is in such variance to what Fadnavis has been endorsing. “Now that we know that there is nothing accelerated or irrigational about these projects which have been going on for over 2-3 decades—seeing huge costs escalations, corruption charges, question marks about their planning, viability, desirability, optimality, quality and final efficiency and effectiveness—why is more money being sought to be sunk in them?” asks Dandekar.
 
It will be recalled that FM Jaitley opened his budget speech with an agenda to “transform India,” based on nine pillars. He highlighted agriculture and farmers’ welfare as the foremost pillar and spoke of the government’s focus on doubling farmers’ income by 2022. While allocating Rs 35, 984 crores for agriculture and farmers’ welfare, he rightly diagnosed how “irrigation is the critical input for increasing agricultural production and productivity.” He also spoke passionately of how in the 141 million hectares of net cultivated area, only 46% is irrigated, underlining a “need to address optimal utilisation of water resources, create new irrigation infrastructure, conserve soil fertility, value addition and connectivity from farm to markets.”
 
The government plans to implement the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana in mission mode to bring 28.5 lakh hectares under irrigation, according to Jaitley who told the House, “A major part of this will be done through fast tracking and implementation of 89 irrigation projects under AIBP which have been languishing. These will help irrigate 80.6 Lakh hectares. These projects will need Rs 17,000 crores next year and 86,500 crores in next five years. 23 of these will be completed before 31 March, 2017.”
 
It is nobody’s case that the government abandon all incomplete projects, say others like water rights activist Himanshu Thakkar, “But before the government spends more good money after already sunk costs on incomplete projects, it needs to halt creation of additional major and medium irrigation projects. It should undertake a credible, independent review of why the projects are incomplete for so long, going into the loopholes and lessons from past mistakes. This exercise will help decide which projects are worth going ahead, in what form and, more importantly, which need to be abandoned. Without doing such an exercise, the money allocated for incomplete projects is not going to help the farmers,” he told dna.
 
Out of 89 active AIBP projects across the country, 46 projects have been prioritised in the Union budget. Half of these are to be completed by 2016-17 and the other half are to be completed by 2019-20. 13 of these 46 projects are from Maharashtra.



Maharashtra, Farmers, Irrigation, Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Projects (AIBP), Water rights, Budget 2016, Arun Jaitley, Devendra Fadnavis

“Across the country, but more sharply so in Maharashtra,” points out Thakkar, “large irrigation projects have not automatically meant increased irrigated area, which is what the farmer needs. SANDRP has shown with official data that even after spending over Rs 600,000 crores on major and medium dam and canal network between 1993-2010-11, net national canal irrigated area has been decreasing and not increasing."
 
Dandekar too points outs, “If the large dams approach delivered all that it promised, then Maharashtra, with the largest number of large dams in the country would have had the highest irrigated area. The actual picture is opposite. Maharashtra has the lowest irrigated area in the country at about 18%.”
 
According to her this is not a coincidence. “As the dam scam highlighted, more large projects with complicated, ever-changing plans, far away offices and opaque funding mechanisms meant that local people had no clue about what was happening, leaving doors open for the unholy nexus of netas, babus, contractors and engineers to gnaw away public funds, without ensuring irrigation.”

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