Yogendra Yadav - Drought in India: PM Modi's inaction speaks louder than his boastful words
It must have been the
heat. Or else, why would I react so to the perfectly sane and sage advice from
our own prime minister? Why would I find his address insufferable, obscene and
pompous? After all, he was
talking about the drought, something that I want to hear about. He was advocating
drought proofing, not wasting a drop of water, more crop per drop – things that
I often talk about. Why this hot-headed reaction then?
I was trying to catch
an afternoon nap under the shifting sun-shade of a mango tree in the rural
hinterland of drought-affected Latur. It was the second day of our Jal-Hal padyatra. We had walked for about 15 kilometres in the forenoon, much more than we had
anticipated.
That is when a colleague alerted me to the agency report about the prime minister's Mann Ki Baat. I scanned through the report, was annoyed, asked for a full copy, was furious and surprised at the intensity of my reaction. Was it just the heat? Or my proximity to the unfolding tragedy?
Maybe. But consider
another thought. Obscenity usually does not lie in words. It often lies in the
context in which an otherwise harmless word is spoken. If a columnist or a
professor has expressed these sentiments, it could be excusable, perhaps even
welcome. But when the man
tasked with responding to a disaster takes to musing right in the middle of a
crisis, something is out of place. And when he uses these sagely utterances to
cover up his own inaction and for thinly disguised self-promotion, perhaps
there is something obscene here.
A simple fact check
might help.
The prime minister
patted his own back for meeting all the CMs of drought affected states
separately, not in a group as may have been done in the past. What he did not
mention is what the CMs asked for and what he has done about it.
Fact is that state
governments have been asking for money from the National Disaster Response
Fund. They were given much less than what they needed and asked for, that too
after considerable delays. Uttar Pradesh, for example, got its funds after the
end of the financial year.
Ever since the yatra began,
we have been listening to the woes of the poor, agricultural labour. They are
desperate for jobs. The construction work they can get is very infrequent. Farm
work is not available now. In any case, women get
just Rs 100 per day. They all want MNREGA work that pays Rs 191. The trouble is
that MNREGA is starved of funds by the central government. The situation is
much worse in Maharashtra, where the entire scheme has been captured by the
rural-landed class. PM chose to applaud Maharashtra for its drought management.
He also patted (who
else?) the Gujarat government for the use of technology in combating the
drought. The fact is that the Supreme Court indicted the government of Gujarat
more than once for following antiquated, colonial practices of annawari and
for failing to use modern indices and remote sensing data.
The PM spoke of
preventing water wastage. Who can possibly disagree with that? But it is one
thing to talk about petty wastage, quite another to take on water misuse,
diversion built into our models of growth. Next to the mango
tree, there was a private tanker filling up water from one of the few
functional wells. Just two weeks ago, P Sainath had shown us slides of
advertisements for residential complexes with swimming pool on each floor! I
was waiting for the PM to talk about such matters or about the massive
diversion of water from agriculture to industry and cities.
He did not. Moral of the story:
Switch on your AC before you switch on the next Mann ki Baat!
