T N Ninan: What voters want

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The experts have said that these elections are about lots of things. Development, for instance, as opposed to stressing Hindutva. Shining and non-shining India, to take another clash of perceptions.

Incumbency issues, caste and other alignments in the northern heartland, stability and the choice of leader (seasoned Indian vs unseasoned Italian), and so on.

You can be sure it is a bit of all of these, but the one issue that has cropped up over and over again, in one constituency after another, in a whole series of states "" and which has got surprisingly little notice as a recurring theme "" is water.

One newspaper report talked of how Manvendra Singh (the finance minister's son, who is a Lok Sabha candidate) was going from meeting to meeting in Barmer, promising to bring people water; every other candidate in the area was doing exactly the same thing and all of them faced a credibility problem because the voters had heard this before.

In Karnataka, Chief Minister S M Krishna admitted to a newspaper that he was having a tough time with voters because the state had faced a drought for three consecutive years.

In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu has tried to do quite a lot to improve water management, but successive droughts and serious water scarcity have turned the people away from him "" at least, that's what the polls and analysts say.

And in West Bengal, the dailies carried a picture of local residents blocking all traffic on the main arterial highway leading west from Kolkata for an incredible 12 hours, protesting the lack of water.

I am reminded of a meeting that M S Swaminathan had with students of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur many years ago. He asked the engineers of the future what they thought was the No 1 problem faced by India's farmers.

The students, almost all of them from urban backgrounds, gave a variety of answers (fertiliser, lack of credit, high-yielding seeds, and so on), until Dr Swaminathan told them it was water.

Today, it is becoming an issue not just on the farms but also in cities and towns, as India's per capita water availability has dropped to a third of what it was half a century ago, and is slated to drop further.

In Gurgaon, where I live, the ground water table has been dropping 10 feet every year for the past seven years; at this rate, what is said to be the country's most happening suburban development could become like Akbar's Fatehpur Sikri "" an exciting new city that has to be abandoned for want of water.

Gurgaon is not alone; virtually any city or town that you can think of in the country seems to have a serious water problem: Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai...

In the granary states of Punjab and Haryana, they say that groundwater tapping has already reached the 100 per cent limit. Even places that you would think should never have water scarcity (like rain-drenched Kerala) seem to do so.

Coca-Cola could never have imagined that its plant in this state with many rivers and endless greenery would be ordered to close because local residents complained of a diversion of the available water.

In Tamil Nadu's rich Cauvery delta, the fate of the sitting candidate is sealed if Karnataka has not released enough water for use downstream.

Even as the problem has grown to crisis proportions, solutions aren't easy.

Governments at the Centre and states don't seem properly organised to address the issue, the money being pumped in is never enough, futuristic schemes like linking different riverbeds divert attention from the here and now (like encouraging rainwater harvesting), and attempts to build dams "" like the one on the Narmada that has brought water to the otherwise dry Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, and to hundreds of villages in Saurashtra "" become the focus of endless agitation on account of the displacement of people in the catchment area.

So, whichever grouping gets the chance to form the government after the elections, had better put its most purposive minister in charge of water "" if that grouping wants to win re-election five years from now. More votes hinge on water availability than most people realise.