GUJARAT HASN'T learnt any lessons from last year's drought. The State Government is gearing up to tackle the state's second drought in succession.
Concerns have been expressed over the lack of a comprehensive water policy. Gujarat is heading for an ecological disaster, thanks to an ad-hoc handling of the problem every year.
It's not uncommon for a tropical country like India to experience droughts related to monsoon failures. What is alarming about the recent droughts in Gujarat is that they are related to hydrological factors, where even drinking water becomes unavailable
for a vast section of the people not directly dependent on agriculture.
Surface and ground water resources had been exploited to provide water for consumption and for other household chores. No attempts were made to control the unrestricted use of water by rich farmers and the industrial sector.
According to official sources, out of 143 dams and other reservoirs in Kutch, Saurashtra and north Gujarat, 107 had gone dry this year.*(See graph)
This trend is different from the earlier droughts in Gujarat when lack of rains led to crop failure, which in turn resulted in food scarcity.
Monsoon failure over the last two years had led to a 'hydrological drought', throwing a big chunk of the State's population into a drinking water crisis for around the year.
Experts said that even during the countrywide famine at the turn of the century and the great Bengal famine in the '40s, there was no drinking water crisis as Gujarat faced now.
The Government does not seem to have a long-term solution for the crisis. Their approach has been to manage drinking water supply from other areas and provide subsistence wages to the rural poor by way of relief work.
NGOs said that such an approach did not take into account the reality that such droughts would recur every year if water resources were not managed judiciously.
Achyut Yagnik of Setu, an NGO, said with India becoming self-reliant in food production, agricultural drought due to monsoon failure could be taken care of by getting foodgrains from other places.
But drinking water could not be transported over large distances on a permanent basis. To find a permanent solution to the crisis, the orientation, approach and implementation of the water policy had to change, he said.
Tomorrow: Political apathy to water wastage
