 "Latur, Drought, Water, Tanks")
The first ever water train in Maharashtra has left Miraj for Latur. There are no armed guards on the train, not yet.
The Water Express with 10 wagons, each loaded with 50,000 litres of water, will make its juddering way on a single line through Pandharpur, Kuruduwadi and Osmanabad, all in the grips of a big thirst.
Miraj is considered a big station where trains stop routinely to refuel, for cleaning and refilling with clean water. But Miraj didn’t have this order of water, so ironically it was brought from Kota in Rajasthan, a desert state.
The train will take nine hours to reach Latur, all other trains being diverted to make way for the Water Express. It took more than a day to fill the tankers. It will take another full day to evacuate the wagons.
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Water will then be transported to areas around Latur, where taps have been dry for the past 21 days.
Latur’s water pipelines are in a stage of advanced decay and leakage is to the tune of 50 per cent. Tenders for a new pipeline along with a water purification plant have been floated four or five times by the municipal corporation but have found no takers.
“It is dirty work. No one wants to do it,” says former Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.
Latur is to Maharashtra what Kota is to Rajasthan: a local population of around 350,000 people sustained by some industry, a few breweries further afield; but mainly a massive coaching centre economy supporting a floating population of around 150,000 people every summer.
These are children, accompanied by their parents, in the town for intensive coaching to get into engineering colleges, attending classes that begin at 6 am and continue till midnight.
The district administration while imposing Section 144 in the city has asked those who do not belong to Latur to please return home. Similar orders have been issued in Parbhani nearby. Locals say they are sending their children to stay with grandparents. In the past it used to be a tradition to go to the "native place" for the summer holidays. This summer it is a necessity.
Most industries are shut. Labour is migrating and unconfirmed reports say people from Marathwada are flocking to Pune and Thane in search of jobs. Evidence suggests doctors, lawyers and chartered accountants have taken house-cum-offices in towns like Aurangabad and Kolhapur on rent. It is traumatic, shifting base. But what can you do when you don’t get water for weeks?
No one knows what has happened to the cattle. In a drought cattle is the first to be set loose. The government replied in the Legislative Assembly that three cattle camps had been established and there were 1,360 heads of cattle in them. That seems hardly credible – 1,360 heads of cattle for a largely agricultural population of 300,000?
There are differing versions on how things came to this pass in Marathwada. The way the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tells it, the origins of the water crisis lie in the systematic exploitation the Majra irrigation project, a reservoir that used to supply water to five or six big towns in Marathwada, including Latur. However, several politicians from this region, including former Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, Shivajirao Nilangekar and Shivaraj Patil established sugar factories. When the water would be released from the reservoir for irrigation, it would be pumped up to the tanks of sugar factories, built to accommodate crores of liters of water. Successive Congress regimes just looked the other way.
The Congress’s response is: when the BJP came to power, did it cancel the crushing licences of these factories if it knew they were using illegal water? Cancelling the crushing licences would have meant farmers would be unable to sell sugarcane to the factories.
Some Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) have said in the Assembly that breweries in Aurangabad should be shut temporarily to save water – they use four million litres of water a month. But this is unsustainable, these companies will lose market share and will have to lay off labour. Congress MLAs ask whose liability will it be when the layoffs happen?
Last week, at a public meeting, Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray is reported to have said, “Our government is a naalayak government, if people start thinking of the work of previous governments and comparing it to ours.” The Shiv Sena is an alliance partner of the BJP.
The Centre, meanwhile, is trying to close the stable doors and keep the horse in. Cabinet Secretary Pradeep Kumar Sinha on Monday held a meeting via videoconference with all chief secretaries to assess the preparedness to meet the crisis of drought and untimely rains in several parts of the country.
It was decided to ensure timely release of the Centre’s share of State Disaster Relief Funds, priority to works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) in drought-affected areas and fodder management for livestock. States were also asked to hold animal health camps.
The cabinet secretary also asked for perfect coordination between states and ministries of railways, food, agriculture and the National Disaster Mission on drinking water availability. According to sources, the cabinet secretary was of the view that there was no reason for any drinking water crisis in states, except in parts of Maharashtra and Jharkhand, where the water table is below normal.
He said the Centre was willing to give funds to the state for procurement of water tankers. It was noted that even in Maharashtra, water in the Koena dam was sufficient, but the problem was in transportation to drought-affected areas and this was being addressed.
Earlier in the day, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh told a BJP ‘Rashtriya Kisan Kalyan Sammelan’ that they should spread the message of the government’s efforts in providing irrigation. He said it was shameful that nothing was done for 60 of the 67 years after Independence to ensure irrigation in drought-prone districts.
Singh said it was only the governments of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Bihari Vajpayee that thought of farmers, and now it was the Modi government that had launched several schemes, including the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sinchayee Yojana. Referring to the water crisis in several regions, he sought to blame state governments for not taking advantage of the Centre’s policies. “Agriculture and irrigation are state subjects. You need to hold state governments accountable,” he said.
He said the government had already put in place an irrigation plan for 150 districts and would have such plans for all 636 districts by September. He said the priority would be drought-prone districts and the focus would be on popularising drip and sprinkler irrigation.
