New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday rapped the States of Gujarat, Bihar and Haryana for not declaring drought in their states despite experiencing deficient rainfall and fall in production of food grains.
Expressing anguish over the apathy of the states in refusing to accept that there is a drought and people are suffering, a Bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and N.V. Ramana told the counsel “The case is about people’s lives.”
When counsel for Gujarat submitted that only 526 villages were affected, Bench questioned as to why there was delay in declaring drought even in these villages. Counsel said the State could not do so because of local body elections.
Annoyed at this submission, the bench asked “Will all work stop if there are elections? Elections cannot bring everything to a standstill. People are dying, how can you be so careless? When situation was clear in September last that there could be drought, why did you wait till April 1 this year to declare drought?” The bench was referring to the municipal polls in the state which were conducted in December-January. The bench directed Gujarat government to immediately releases the special packages for farmers in drought-hit districts.
Referring to Haryana which had not filed an affidavit in the writ petition filed by Swaraj Abhyan, the bench told the counsel “Is this seriousness that you show on this (drought) issue? We are talking about people who are dying, not tourists. Please do something. This is not a picnic,” he added.
Upon this, the state counsel handed over some documents to the Bench which mostly turned out to be old statistics with no relevance to the PIL case about scanty rainfall in 12 states in the last two years. Haryana, however, said it was not declaring drought as there was no fall in its foodgrains production. Farmers mainly depended on river waters supplied through canals, besides tubewells, it said.
Bihar also said there was no drought in the State. This prompted the Bench to wonder as to why the Centre had come out with the drought manual if states were not to follow it. At this, Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand said the manual was recommendatory and not binding on the states.
The Bench said the government could not deny the poor people the benefits due to them in the event of drought. In drought hit areas, people were entitled to 150 days of work, against 100 days in other places under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). There were also entitled to supply of essential commodities such as lentils, egg, oil and milk at subsidised rates. According to the petitioner, NGO Swaraj Abhiyan, the other nine states facing drought are Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
