Water, water nowhere

Striking? Well, it ought to be. There is a huge scarcity of water everywhere, and yet there is no judicious use of it. Instead, the powers that be are only making a mess of it. Not only is water being diverted for different purposes without any prioritization, there is clearly a huge conspiracy to hand over the extremely important natural resource to corporates at negligible cost. Not just in villages, even in cities there is a clear discrimination in favour of the rich as opposed to the poor. In areas that receive water from the municipality, the water first reaches the flats, thanks to an illegitimate way of putting the pipes in an inclined way. The not so well to do residents in ordinary dwellings suffer from lack of water, even as the rich have water for luxurious purposes like gardening (which is only for show off and not proper kitchen gardening either).

This article from The Hindu only reinstates the extent of mismanagement of water :

The HPC in its 21 meetings which were analysed gave speedy approval without following any norms, the report said. The bulk of the allocations, 46 per cent were reserved for industries and 54 per cent for drinking water and domestic use, belying the popular notion that industries got very little water from dams. The largest chunk of water for domestic use —16.94 per cent went for drinking water to big and small cities and gram panchayats. Mumbai, Pune, Navi Mumbai, Nashik and Nagpur were the beneficiaries while only 1.75 per cent went to gram panchyats. Of the industrial allocations, thermal power plants received the largest amount of water — a whopping 64 per cent, MIDC 19 per cent and SEZ 14 per cent.

Forty-seven companies benefited from water allocations and of this 12 companies or one-fourth of them got 90 per cent. Of the 15 thermal power plants which benefitted, 13 were private power companies including Sofia Power Company (India Bulls) Amravati, India Bulls Mega Power plant, Adani, Lanco, apart from two National Thermal Power Company plants in Nagpur and Solapur. Of the industries, three private companies– Reliance got eight per cent, India Bulls -17 per cent and Adani 7. 7 per cent of the water allocations. Prayas notes that HPC gave the highest benefits to private companies and clearly the dam waters instead of going to farmers went to industries or cities.

Ajit Pawar’s “urinate in dam” comment shows insensitivity of the powers that be

Referring to the hunger strike by a drought-affected farmer at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, Pawar had said “He has been on fast for the last 55 days. (But)If there is no water in the dam, how can we release it? Should we urinate into it? If there is no water to drink, even urinating is not possible.”

This is what Mr. Ajit Pawar said in relation to something as tragic and yet as common and equally dismal a state of affairs of Indian farmers. Crores of rupees in the form of revenue foregone are lost because of no taxation on corporates.

And yet, there is no money for improvement of infrastructure, inputs and irrigation for more sustainable and profitable farming – a sector which accounts for an overwhelming chunk of this agro based economy.

It is a well known fact that in India a farmer commits suicide every half an hour. And the kind of insensitivity manifested by Mr. Ajit Pawar here is hardly anything new. Earlier also, similar hurtful and shameless remarks have been made by our “esteemed” leaders [question is: where do they lead us to?!]. Farmers who took their lives were said to have had “family feuds” and other such blatant attempts were made to shift the blame and evade responsibility by those in power. 

P. Sainath’s articles on farmer suicides in India will be a good place to start digging up the mountains of information on the deplorable state of agriculture and the people associated with it.