Drought in India's rural hinterland is centrally a political issue and not exclusively a meteorological effect. For over a century, colonial and post-colonial governments in New Delhi have been slowly starving the Indian countryside and the majority of its rural populace with policies and technologies that have systematically eroded the ecological viability of village units. The creative traditions of rainwater harvesting, cropping strategies to cope with rainfall variability and the careful tapping of drainage basins have been relentlessly snuffed out. What we are witnessing today is not drought per se but rural India's extreme social and economic vulnerability to meteorological variation. A technology-first central bureaucracy has rendered it unable to respond creatively, locally, to varying levels of rainfall.
Simultaneous with the dramatic transformation of the rural ecology, urban myths about the agrarian world and its productive possibilities have flourished. Notably, the idea has been promoted that there is an intrinsic worth to indiscriminately extending perennial canal irrigation, cash crop monocultures and increasing crop yields by industrialising agricultural inputs and operations. If anything, the drought of this year has clearly revealed that there is a heavy ecological price tag on the sustained reorganisation of the countryside as a colony of the city. Further, highly skewed property and power relations in the village, along with a sharp imbalance in the terms of trade between the rural and urban sectors, have also significantly sapped the ecological resilience of India's vast agrarian hinterland. In other words, the national economy's relentless demand for a specific type and level of agricultural productivity is undermining the fragile equilibrium of land, forest, river and field.
The Indian prime minister's recent plea in parliament that the opposition not 'politicise' the issue of drought is another attempt to sidetrack a potentially important debate on the future of rural India. Thus, an essentially political issue is being unfairly projected as a technical problem, with the absurd claim that the interlinking of India's rivers through a canal grid is the "only solution to drought". Responding to a petition by a Delhi-based lawyer, on 31 October, the Supreme Court of India directed the government to constitute a task force to look into the possibility of realising the plan by 2012 instead of 2046 as had been originally envisaged. What the judiciary, the executive, the bureaucracy and the legislature do not seem to understand, or perhaps wilfully ignore, is that a river is not merely a mass of water moving with a certain velocity. It is primarily a geomorphologic phenomenon that feeds into several biological and chemical processes. Rivers nourish, link and sustain a variety of ecosystems which span various grades of floodplains and wetlands. Hydrologists have for long pointed out that tampering with flood patterns or altering the water's temperature with dams or barrages can negatively impact flora and fauna, besides irrevocably damaging habitats.
Dehydration assured