Amita Baviskar - Made in India: The drought is no longer a natural disaster
Doing research in
Alirajpur in southwest Madhya Pradesh in 1990, I heard old Adivasis recount
stories of the Chhappania Akal (in Vikram Samvat 1956) that defined their
grandparents' lives. This was the great famine of 1899-1900, when Alirajpur,
along with the rest of the Indian subcontinent, distant China and remote
Brazil, was subject to a meteorological crisis brought on by an El Nino
oscillation in the Pacific. Between 1876 and 1902, El Niño caused three such
synchronous waves of drought, claiming 50 million lives.
Death and devastation
are always tragic. But this carnage was criminal, and unforgivably so. For even
as the drought unfolded, it was evident the deaths could be prevented. Yet the
government clung to policies that worsened the crisis. Historian Mike Davis
documents how the natural scarcity caused by El Nino created catastrophic
effects because of a colonial political economy. His book Late Victorian Holocausts argues that people in places like Alirajpur had survived previous
droughts by fine-tuning farming practices and crafted social webs of mutual
obligation that helped them weather uncertainties.
This resilience was
destroyed when they were colonised, forcibly thrust into the global market for
cash crops, on terms of trade dictated by London, and with profits accumulated
in the imperial country. In debt, denied state support, unable to withstand
drought, millions of Indians died of starvation and disease. Davis notes that
"in the very half-century when peacetime famine permanently disappeared
from western Europe, it increased devastatingly throughout much of the colonial
world".
The Chhappania Akal is
worth remembering today because large parts of the country are experiencing
something very similar. And the government in Delhi could well be living in
London for all that it is doing about it.
In this third
successive year of drought, emergency measures to provide drinking water to affected
areas continue to be sporadic. Fodder and water for livestock remain scarce.
Distress migration is escalating because programmes like NREGS that provide
local employment and income have been gutted, with back wages unpaid and new
works suspended. There is still no serious effort to regulate water supply to
industries and restrict non-priority uses. Meanwhile, water mafias flourish:
the borewell drillers and tanker owners that P. Sainath described so vividly in
Everybody Loves a Good Drought carry on ripping off the rural poor, confident
that their political backers will stand by them.
Every crisis is an
opportunity. In the past, water scarcity was a constraint that inspired
communities to conserve water, devising locally appropriate technologies to share
resources. Rajasthan's baolis and Tamil Nadu's eris are just two of the many
water harvesting systems that survive to this day. However, they have been
sidelined by spectacular state projects such as large dams. The
post-Independence epidemic of dam-building (India has the third highest number
in the world) has left us with ruined riverine ecosystems, millions of
displaced people and colossal wastage of water for modest gains.
The same
builder-bureaucrat consortium that backs big dams is trying its utmost to push
through an even more grandiose scheme for interlinking rivers. The estimated
economic and social costs of this project are mind-boggling. As is the hubris
of assuming that complex river basin ecologies can be treated like plumbing: a
matter of installing an elbow joint here and turning a tap there. But can a
government bent upon accelerating mining in forested hills that form the
catchment of peninsular rivers be expected to grasp this basic truth?
A government that
understands the importance of ecology and equity could do so much! These are
complex issues but, to start with, it could:
- Prioritise public spending on local
watershed development in rain-fed areas. NREGS partnerships between state
governments, villagers and NGOs such as the Samaj Pragati Sahyog and Dhan
Foundation have dramatically improved the welfare of people and the land
- Practise a mix of regulation and reward to
make farmers and manufacturers, cities and towns, adopt water-efficient
practices. (We now have programmes to improve energy efficiency; why not
water?)
- Protect forests and floodplains, lakes,
wetlands and other catchments.
Our cars, planes and coal-fired power
plants have induced climate change, amplifying the variability of the monsoons
and melting the glaciers that feed our perennial rivers. And in areas where
deep drilling has sucked ground-water dry, water scarcity is not a natural
condition either. Drought and famine are both human-made. And our most
vulnerable people and landscapes are at risk as never before.
Late Victorian Holocausts
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis
charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme
climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. Drought and
monsoons afflicted much of China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt and India. The
death tolls were staggering: around 12m Chinese and over 6m Indians in
1876-1878 alone. The chief culprit, according to Davis, was not the weather,
but European empires, with Japan and the US. Their imposition of free-market
economics on the colonial world was tantamount to a "cultural
genocide".
