Everybody loves a good drought”, a journalist-author once noted with uncommon irony. But people can “love” a good drought only if they get to hear about it. India’s agriculture economy and rural life have been in crisis for the past three years, with the monsoon being scratchy two years running, but not many — except those suffering the consequences — seem to have heard the news.
The rural distress is due to lack of water, food, employment, and — as the Supreme Court reminded us on Wednesday — lack of back wages for MGNREGA. This is also an apt time to worry about the Food Security Act. MGNREGA and the FSA were programmes brought in by the UPA, but their fate appears somewhat uncertain these days.
The principal, indirect, sign that the Centre gave of having heard of the crisis in agriculture was its promise in the Union Budget of doubling rural incomes in the next seven years — a holier-than-thou claim that doesn’t merit much attention because the appropriate levels of investment to make such a promise a reality have nowhere been adumbrated.
A public interest litigation before the SC that listed Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Haryana and Chhattisgarh as being drought-hit, has appropriately urged that the situation should be treated as a “calamity”. Rajasthan has also declared a drought. That’s pretty much the bulk of the country.
With temperatures soaring, official data suggests that 66 people have already died in Telangana though it is just the early part of April. In Maharashtra, the death toll had crossed a few thousand in the first three months of the current year, suggesting that although agriculturists died in the winter months, the effects of the drought had set in much earlier.
On hearing the petition of Swaraj Abhiyan, a bench led by Justice M.B. Lokur was moved to observe there was no point denying that regions such as Bundelkhand and Marathwada were not drought-affected. It was in this context that the additional solicitor-general submitted to the top court that the Centre would soon release '7,500 crore towards MGNREGA back wages.
It is time the government got out of its stupor. It has, even at the highest levels, remained confined to totting up cosmetic changes and changes of nomenclature of schemes and projects as major achievements that will tilt the balance for the country. For ordinary folk, the issue is far more grim than many imagine. The Bombay high court has also done well to ask the BCCI to move the IPL out of Maharashtra, where drought conditions are conspicuous and startling, and not waste millions of gallons of water hosing down cricket pitches.
