Drought of planning

As of mid-August, drought is now “official” in India. The agriculture minister has announced that 246 districts are severely “drought affected” — constituting about 45 per cent of the country.

A 400 km-wide belt in northern India, running from Orissa to Punjab has been adversely affected; this includes the granary of India — west UP, Haryana and Punjab.

The finance minister has declared that the drought will be fought on a “war footing” —  he has not clarified as to what prior preparations had been made to counter the contingency of “war”.

Drought conditions have not been unknown in India; indeed in some pocket or the other every year, there is scanty rainfall, and drought conditions surface. For the past few years however, we have not been visited with severe drought conditions in general; a rule of thumb, going by past experience, is that one year in seven, rainfall becomes scanty.

I recall my first direct encounter with drought conditions, in eastern UP, in 1966, which was a terrible year for east UP and west Bihar. Indeed that was the first time since Independence that the Government of India announced special relief funds to any state, to tackle a natural disaster.

Since then of course, in a ritual manner, most states claim and obtain funds from the Centre for drought or flood relief; the quantum of receipt generally depending on the proximity of the state leadership to the Centre.

However, procedures for disbursement of ‘relief’ become highly relaxed in such circumstances. In the best of times, leakages from development and assistance funds are enormous; when formally ‘drought’ or ‘floods’ are declared, it tantamounts to open licence to local officials and politicians to help themselves freely.

As relief measures, traditionally, from the British days, “test works” were opened, which provided short-term daily-wage employment to landless labour and marginal farmers. Frequently food grain at subsidised prices would be distributed, partly to act as wages.

In addition, in general the “land revenue” was remitted or collection postponed in the affected area. Now, over time, these three weapons have been heavily overused. Indeed, the NREGA programme is the implementation of test works all over the country, in good times and bad.

Distribution of food grain to every BPL (Below Poverty Line) family is now a norm countrywide. Besides, land revenue has long since been abolished; farming loans, both short-term crop loans as well as long-term development loans have been waived all over the country.

Thus, the specialised weapons to be used in identified places of distress have now become standard practices. This is a tacit admission that the rural countryside is in a permanent distress.

The Centre’s recently announced strategy refers to “saving” standing Kharif crops and preparations for Rabi. These are normal preparations before any crop season and are annual events; it is not clear as to what more can be done by the system. The Centre has also stressed on “monitoring” the situation, and is likely to leave the rest to the state governments; perhaps a few thousand additional crores will be distributed for “drought relief”. All these are not likely to make any serious dent in the situation.

An announcement has also been made that imports will be undertaken to ensure that there are no shortages; while this may become inevitable, the international agricultural produce community would already have taken note to raise their export prices very significantly — besides, the process of import usually takes at least one year.

An utter lack of long term planning to address the basic causes that lead to distress conditions, is endemic to our planning and governance processes. Thus, we have an  abysmal failure in dealing with water-related issues, such as irrigation, water-harvesting techniques, preservation of underground water, prevention of deforestation to provide round-the-year waters in the rivers.

Sprinkler irrigation systems provide an ideal way to optimise water usage; but this requires reliable power supply in rural areas — many rural areas in north India do not get even three hours of power in a day; these are the harsh facts in our agricultural scene. It is generally not understood that the preparation to fight drought is on a long term basis, while our approach to each crisis is on an ad-hoc basis.

The average citizen, the small and marginal farmer, the landless labour, the urban slum-dweller do not have safety nets. With advances in satellite imagery techniques in India, it should be technically possible to create a crop insurance programme, with village-wise or even plot-wise coverage; clearly little thought has been given to such aspects.

Severe inflation in the prices of agricultural products at the time of drought will affect every citizen. Is it facetious to speculate that while the GDP will surely fall, the BSE will get a boost, with large segments of industry licking their lips at the prospect of windfall profits, in a shortage economy?