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With the central kitty of Rs 16,000 crore available for drought relief, the drought machinery is certainly working overtime says Devinder Sharma.
August 2002 : As another severe drought threatens to cast its nightmarish shadow, a summer of discontent awaits the farmers. But for the industry and trade, it is big money and big gains - that too at the cost of the state exchequer. The industry has already voiced concern at the withdrawal of the monsoon. After all, the prolonged dry spell has affected its marketing foray into the rural countryside. The more the damage to crop production, the less will be the farmer’s ability to buy, and that will surely impact the recession-hit industry. For a change, therefore, it is the industry, which appears to be reeling more under the impact of the drought. This new phenomenon, which brings the media focus on the negative impact that the industry is faced with, has pushed the poor farmer into the background. Agriculture Minister Mr. Ajit Singh has been quick to respond. Within two weeks of the dry spell, a national consultation of the drought-affected states was held in New Delhi. A high-level committee for disaster management has already been formed under the chairmanship of the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr L.K.Advani, to decide on the disbursal of funds for relief from the National Calamities Contingency Fund (NCCF), which has a total size of Rs 11,000 crore for the years 2001-2005. The Finance Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, has already been urged to be ready to immediately release the second installment from the Calamity Relief Fund (CRF). The high-level disaster management committee will be assisted by an inter-ministerial group chaired by the agriculture secretary. It will be guided by the recommendations of Central teams, which conduct spot assessment of damage in the states. With 13 states reeling under "an alarming situation" from the most widespread drought in 11 years due to a delayed monsoon in northwest and central India, the government has surely swung into timely action. No one can blame political apathy and inefficiency this time. With all eyes on the central kitty of Rs 16,000 crore available under the NCCF and CRF, the drought machinery is certainly working overtime. Essentially to ensure that the demand from the rural areas does not fall, and thereby that the negative impact on the industry is kept at a bare minimum! The Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, who is amongst the first to move for central assistance, refuses to acknowledge that the devastation caused by the delay in the rain spell has been accentuated by the failure of the state to adequately plan and prepare for such eventualities. With his priorities fixed on converting AP into a cyber-state, agriculture, rural development and water management are low down in his government’s plan of action. Nor is Chandrababu Naidu an exception. The Chief Ministers of Karnataka, Maharahstra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh have also been trying to emulate the high-tech model. Naidu has sought Rs 610-crore as financial assistance from the Centre, and one million tonnes of foodgrain to carry out an employment generation programme. Karnataka chief minister, Mr S.M.Krishna, led an all party delegation to the Prime Minister, asking for Rs 553.25 crores and six lakh tonnes of foodgrains to carry out drought relief work. With 14 districts reeling under a spectre of drought in Tamilnadu, that state is getting ready with its demand note, which surely is likely to exceed Rs 200 crore. The entire effort in reality being to ensure that small and marginal farmers as well as the large workforce of landless labourers are involved in 'food for work' programmes, while the bulk of the resources are diverted for other activities. A serious drought enables the affected state government to cry for more Central relief funds. The main strategy will once again be employment generation through relief works, transporting water, augmenting existing water resources and creation of new sources for water, cattle conservation through opening of fodder depots, effective re-targetting of the public distribution system and so on. Year after year, the state governments have indulged in these fire-fighting exercises in the name of combating drought. And year after year, drought and dry spells have enabled these states to overcome their overdraft and ever-deepening crunch in financial resources. It has happened in the past and it is sure to happen now. It has become an accepted practice to hoodwink the tax-payers to believe that the financial allocation is for combating drought and mitigating human suffering. That such an acute drought should strike at a time when the country has had 14 consecutive years of a bountiful monsoon, leaves behind a sordid tale of misplaced priorities and the collapse of the policy planning. If only successive governments had demonstrated the wisdom to understand the complexities of a drought and the trauma of the human suffering that it leaves behind, the country would have by now successfully evolved a drought-proofing mechanism. In reality, the government policies during the past decade have been to remove the safeguards the farmer has and to push him to be faced with the vagaries of the market economy. In fact. if it were not for the prevailing drought, the entire focus of the government was to remove the state support that has enabled the farmers to produce a bumper harvest. Such has been the apathy towards the rural areas that the government has instead kept up its pressure on providing more sops to the information technology industry. At the peak of the drought that swept through the drylands of the country in 1999-2000, the Prime Minister announced Rs 11,000 crores worth of sops to the information technology sector. More recently, a series of tax concessions and tax holidays for the IT sector were provided, somehow giving the impression that the solutions to the human suffering in the drought-affected areas lie in Pentium technology. Little realising that for several years now, drought and prolonged dry spells have continued to afflict the inhospitable and harsh environs of the dryland regions, constituting nearly 70 per cent of the country’s cultivable lands. Despite the monsoons being ‘normal’, the failure of rains in certain pockets and the continuing dry spells simply went unreported. With traditional forms of water storage and harvesting having vanished, and rural irrigation being completely taken over by inefficient government machinery, the government has now privatised the waters of river Sheonath in Chhattisgarh. In the years to come, more and more rivers are likely to be privatised thereby making it difficult for the farmers to get irrigation water. An ambitious programme to bring nearly 65 million hectares of cultivable land through a series of "watersheds" in the next 25 years has been launched. With an estimated outlay of Rs 76,000 crore, the programme envisages clubbing the efforts of the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development. Sadly, no lessons have been learnt. Not once have we questioned whether the existing "watershed" management system is what the country needs or if it is time to look for indigenously time-tested technologies. What is not known is that the existing "ridge to valley" system of watershed management has been borrowed from the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States and is not suitable for the Indian conditions where the entire rainfall occurs in some 100 hours during the monsoon season. No one has ever questioned the efficacy of an alien water harvesting technology into which an investment of Rs 16,000-crore has already been sunk. In short, there has been no sincere effort to minimise the dreadful impact of drought. Recurring drought has emerged as a blessing in disguise for the politicians, planners and now the industry – literally making hay while the scorching sun continues to shine. And as and when the furore and dust over the mismanagement of drought and resulting food insecurity dies down, industry will find the relief and rehabilitation allocations handy to create more demand for its products. Devinder Sharma
August 2002 Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. Among his recent works include two books GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair and In the Famine Trap