Everybody Loves a Good Drought
by P. Sainath
Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 1996
ISBN 0 14 25984 8
In the early 1980s, villagers in Naupada district in India´s eastern Orissa state became the subject of one of the most farcical developmental experiments ever. The poorest residents of the district were given "miracle cows", which were to be inseminated with Jersey semen to ensure a high milk yield. To ensure that the wondrous beasts did not ruin the experiment by mating with local studs, all the region´s sturdy Khariar bulls were castrated. And to make sure that the hybrids were well fed, other poor villagers were given plots of land, not to grow food for themselves but to raise subabul trees for fodder. The bureaucrats congratulated themselves at the genius of this perfect anti-poverty programme.
Two years and two million rupees later, eight weak calves were born. Most of them died soon after. The survivors did not produce any milk at all. The Khariar cattle, which produced between four and five litres of milk a day, have all but become extinct. Though subabul saplings were planted by the thousand, few survived. So the district administration took the land back from the programme´s ´beneficiaries´. Naupada is still among the ten poorest districts in India.
This is just one among the dozens of anecdotes that P. Sainath employs in Everybody Loves a Good Drought to demonstrate the tragic comedy of India´s developmental process.