October 23, 1982 Calcutta Diary A M THE story, nothing new, is one of parched land and drying stalks all over. The rains, which played truant in the early weeks, had come, a reluctant visitor, but left all too suddenly and much too early. For much of the eastern states, this deficiency in rainfall is a repetition, on a much larger scale, of what happened last year. And, for the overwhelming mass of the rural poor, it is too much to expect a staying power which could spill beyond one year on to the next In village after village, taluka after Muka, in district after desolate district, in Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal, the spectre is of a prolonged foodlessness. Nature being what it is, in a country of our dimensions, droughts will co-exist with floods. Droughts and floods both cause immense hardship, including loss of lives. In the case of floods, the accompanying destruction encompasses the flimsy dwellings of the poor, which, more often than not, are in the low-lying areas. But, at least following the floods, you have the promise of a delayed crop and sometimes, even the promise of a higher yield per acre, because of the richness of the siltations left in the soil by the receding flood water. Droughts, in contrast, have no mitigating story to tell. The land burns up, the bodies shrivel, the vultures fly, the survival of humans and beasts are rendered into a chancy affair altogether dependent on trie doles which government agencies might distribute. For this nation's majority, the reservoir of sustenance is defined by a precariously low threshold. They begin by selling off the wife's trinkets, if she has any, and end by selling off, one by one, the meagre household wares. In terms of marketed value, both represent laughable magnitudes. This, to repeat, is the eternal story of the Indian countryside. The three and a half decades since Independence has not, at least among these parts, meant much of a difference to either the contours or the specific details of the story. And one of those conundrums of official policy has further ensured that these parts will remain peculiarly vulnerable to droughts. The lower Gangetic plains, which also happen to be at least partial beneficiaries of the siltations deposited by the tributaries of Brahmaputra as they bulldoze their way to the Bay of Bengal, were among the most fertile tracts in the country. Soil conditions apart, the fertility was attributable to the plentitude of natural rainfall too. The tract was full of the promise of rich harvests; it in no time was burdened with a relatively large population, on account of both lush human fertility and heavy immigration. The fertility of the soil was itself then the factor which set trie land-man ratio in, these parts at sharp variance to what was happening elsewhere in the country. A particular aspect of official policy-making has worsened matters. On the face of it, you would consider the policy unexceptionable, Since these parts were blessed by natural rainfall, the official decision was against supplementary provisions for irrigation water. Irrigation works were therefore under-emphasised. Even when you throw in village ponds and makeshift arrangements for watering channels, and account is also taken of the post-Independence flurry of multipurpose irrigation-cum-power projects, barely 15 per cent of the total arable area in the eastern states is under formal irrigation. True, this is not a unique situation, several areas in the south fare no better, but contrast the situation with what obtains in the north-west: the proportion of total arable land under irrigation is as high as 95 per cent in, say, some of the districts in Punjab. In a sense' it is a perfectly sensible arrangement; areas which are deficient in natural rainfall ought to get additional facilities of irrigation; so it was altogether legitimate for government to do what it did.
