Why drought-hit tag to Gujarat delayed: Supreme Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned the Centre as to why it granted extension of time to Gujarat to declare the State as ‘drought-hit’ in April this year during the pendency of the court proceedings as against February, the time set earlier.

During the last hearing on April 7, the court had rapped the States of Gujarat, Bihar and Haryana for not declaring drought in their States though there is deficient rainfall and fall in production of foodgrains.

The court took the Haryana government to task on its request to file an affidavit on the drought issue after completing its arguments, saying the proceedings were not a “tamasha” or a “joke”.

A Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and N.V. Ramana, hearing a PIL filed by Swaraj Abhyan told the Additional Solicitor General P.S. Narasimha “we want to know whether a State government can say that it will not implement a Central law which it has adopted and what is the role of the Centre in such situations.”

The ASJ said in a federal set up the Centre can only issue advisories and guidelines to the State government and it is the sovereign and executive power of the State to declare a particular area or areas as drought-hit.

Except the Disaster Management Act, there is no law governing drought in the country which can be uniformly followed, he said. On Gujarat the ASG said it is the responsibility of the State to identify the beneficiary households and it took some time for the State government to collect data.

Extension of time to declare a state as drought hit was given to all the States and not with reference to Gujarat, he clarified.  He said the methodology to declare drought varies from state to state and the Centre can only indicate the broad parameters.

According to the petitioner, NGO Swaraj Abhiyan, the other nine states facing drought are UP, MP, Karnataka, AP, Ts, Maharashtra, Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.