Failure Worse Than Kargil

On the surface, the nation’s reaction to the drought that has ravaged Gujarat, Saurashtra, Rajasthan and parts of Andhra reflects the increasing self-confidence of a modern society and government. The media is highlighting the crisis and tragedy in the best traditions of the fourth estate. No day has gone by without one or more television channels carrying live footage of carcasses of cattle, wells that have run dry and the sun-baked, cracked clay that is all that remains of ponds and tanks. The government is sending water tankers to the affected areas. Foodgrains are being released from the country’s abundant stocks. Tubewells are being sunk on a war footing. Public works programmes are being started in every district so that the labouring poor might earn their livelihood. NGOS are being roped in to increase the effectiveness of the state agencies and it’s a near-perfect picture of a well-integrated, functioning society.

The picture is gravely flawed. Far from reflecting the health of the State and the Society, the responses to the drought by all the concerned actors reveals its advancing sickness. The giveaway is not in what these institutions have done, but in when they began doing it. For the flurry of reports and actions that we are witnessing today began only two weeks ago. The government and the media are treating the drought as if it were a sudden calamity-an act of God not unlike an earthquake that happened only last month, when the drought actually occurred eight months ago! What were they doing during the intervening months?

The failure of the monsoon in central and western India was noted and reported at least as far back as last October. In its monthly review for October 1999, the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy reported: "The monsoon was particularly harsh on Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. The Gujarat region received scanty or deficient rains in 12 out of 18 weeks...while the Saurashtra and Kutch regions received scanty or deficient rains in 14 of the 18 weeks.... The overall precipitation was 24 per cent below normal (in the former) and 59 per cent below normal (in the latter).... In Tamil Nadu the deficiency in precipitation was 38 per cent. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, the Marathwada region of Maharashtra and Rayalaseema (in Andhra) experienced anxious...dry spells. Western Rajasthan...recorded rains 25 per cent below normal." Could there have been a more explicit warning of the crisis that lay ahead? But that was not all. On March 2, the matter was brought up in the Rajya Sabha by the agricultural economist-turned-politician Yogendra Alagh. Even then no action was taken to avert the looming catastrophe.

To understand the enormity of the failure one must follow the chain of omissions from the village and taluka to the state capitals and New Delhi. The failure of the rains must have been reported by sarpanches and bdos in these regions. None of them could #have understood the consequences-that ground water had not been recharged and well levels were low; that tanks were not even a quarter full (Alagh reported in The Hindustan Times that the actual average was 9 per cent in Saurashtra and had been exhausted by January). Thus literally every one in the rural administration knew that both wells and tanks would run dry even before the onset of summer. They must have communicated this to the concerned state capitals. It was there that nothing at all was done! With every bureaucrat having his gaze fixed firmly upwards at his minister in the hope of a promotion or a lucrative posting, who had the time or inclination to look downwards? In any case who had the courage to be the bearer of bad news? One can detect a similar insouciance in the media. It is inconceivable that at least a few local stringers would not have filed, or attempted to file reports on the drought last October. Many such reports must undoubtedly have appeared in the local and regional press. It is a measure of the growing insularity of the national media, especially the English press, that none of its gatekeepers sensed a story and followed it up.

Worse still, none of them responded to the warnings of social workers and NGOS working in these areas either. Thus were all the lines of communication between people, media and government severed.

It wasn’t always thus. Contrast this to what happened during the Bihar drought in 1966. The first warning that the Hathia (October) rains had failed and that the rice would not therefore germinate, was sounded by Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sarvodaya workers late in the month and reached S. Mulgaokar, editor of The Hindustan Times, in the beginning of November. By mid-November the paper had published double page, award-winning photo-spreads by Kishore Parekh, with detailed accounts (by me) of how it had occurred and what it would do to the people of Bihar (and east UP) in the next 12 months if the winter rains also failed (as they in fact did). Those first reports galvanised the national press. The sustained publicity strengthened the hands of dedicated bureaucrats in the Bihar government, drew unprecedented attention to JP’s appeals for help and led to an outpouring of assistance by Indians from all walks of life. The help and media attention was sustained right through the next bountiful monsoon when the fields were once again full of green waving paddy but there was not a grain of food to eat.

In 1966 India had one civil servant for every two today, and no TV worth speaking of. But the lowliest bureaucrat and publicist had a sense of shared purpose. The drought reveals, as the intelligence failure at Kargil did last year, that this is what the nation’s elite has come close to losing.