People's Democracy

Drought And Its Impact

P K Tandon

AFTER a spell of about two weeks in early June, rains played truant  this year, replacing an atmosphere of hope for peasantry with a sense of despair as the crops grown in the brief period of rainfall began to perish. Those who suffered the worst included the so-called prosperous zone of Punjab, Haryana and western UP which produces about 80 per cent of main food grains. Our agriculture, which employees 65 per cent of our total population and is responsible for about 30 per cent of our national income, thus faces serious devastation.

Rain water supplies more than half of irrigation water that our agriculture requires. It also feeds the underground sources like tube wells. But when rains fail, over-extraction of the underground water reduces supply from tube wells and other wells. In which case the water levels recede further below, reducing the supply and making it costlier.

According to Ajit Singh, union minister of agriculture, much of the crops has been damaged. The worst sufferers are maize and bajra. Besides crop damages, a serious scarcity of drinking water has come up, particularly in Rajasthan. The adivasi-dominated areas in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have reported widespread starvation and even starvation deaths, although the government denies reports about starvation deaths.

After months of hesitation and dilly-dallying, the government has been forced to admit that drought conditions have been prevailing in large parts of the country for the last 3 to 4 years. It has also admitted its continuation with greater intensity, causing more misery and devastation in 2002. Yet the government has sanctioned only a paltry sum of Rs 700 crore towards drought relief for the peasantry. The following figures will show how this peanut kind of supply of funds is totally inadequate for the purpose.

Till early August this year, paddy could be sown in only 15.9 million hectares area, instead of a normal 23.4 million hectares. This comes to only about 68 per cent of the normal area of paddy cultivation. For coarse grains, on the whole, the percentage of actual area sown has dropped to about 70 per cent of the normally cultivated area. The area of bajra cultivation has gone down by about half of the normally cultivated area. While roughly 30 per cent of the land normally sown for kharif crops thus remains unutilised, the crops in some area have been damaged or even totally destroyed. Bulk of the suffers who could not even sow their crops, or whose crops suffered substantial damages, now cannot do anything except starving. On top of that, while the government’s relief of Rs 700 core is quite paltry for such a big mass of the sufferers, that too is yet to become operational in many areas.

In such a situation, no patriotic political or mass organisation can ignore the suffering of vast sections of agricultural labourers and poor peasants who constitute more than half of the rural masses. They are facing starvation in large parts of the country. The government has more than 5.3 crore tonnes of food grains in its godowns and, given political will, this may be distributed among those who are suffering due to the vagaries of nature.

Now it is up to the political parties and mass organisations of different sections of the working people to move and force the government to do something substantial for these starving millions.