#Jaideep Hardikar

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"On the one hand, the tiger population is growing due to conservation efforts that includes a curb on organised poaching; on the other hand are high levels of anthropogenic pressures, including increased dependence of people on forests and an ever-increasing human population," says Ashok Kumar Misra, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), Maharashtra.  “There is no information that I know of about any organised gang of poachers, particularly after 2013 [when the forest department intensified patrolling against poachers],” says Nitin Desai, a Nagpur-based tiger expert, who works with the Wildlife Protection Society of India. In five years, there hasn’t been any unnatural taking down of tigers on a large scale from these landscapes, he adds. That has helped in the natural growth of tiger populations. “If there were 60 tigers in these regions then, there will be a 100 today in the same area. Where will they go? How will we manage a growing population of tigers in the same area? We don’t have any plan,” Desai explains.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis

Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis

“Ramrao is an exemplary work of reportage. Jaideep Hardikar, one of India’s most experienced and seasoned journalists covering rural affairs, has tracked the life of Ramrao, a regular Vidarbha farmer, over the seven years since he attempted suicide and through it presents a window into a decades-old national crisis. Jaideep’s commitment to the story makes this a truly essential biography for our…

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Infectious Outbreaks Threaten the Last Asiatic Lions

Parasites and dog disease in India sweep through the cats’ only home, triggering fears for the species’ survival

Jaideep Hardikar on 

December 10, 2018

When two lion cubs were found dead one day this September in India’s Gir National Park, forest officials shrugged off their demise as “natural.” Three weeks later, however, 23 lions had perished—sparking fears an epidemic could very quickly devastate the last surviving population of the Asiatic lion.

Suspecting a viral outbreak, authorities captured the 19 remaining lions in the eastern edge of the sanctuary—the part where seven of the deaths had occurred—and isolated them individually at a care center. Only three survived.

The canine distemper virus (CVD) was initially blamed as the main cause of the deaths, but experts caution other factors were probably involved. “We need a serious multidisciplinary investigation of the outbreak,” says wildlife biologist Ravi Chellam. The deaths have sparked debate not only over their immediate cause but also about conservation strategies—and have reignited a decades-old call for some members of the endangered lion species to be transferred elsewhere as insurance against future calamities. Wildlife scientists say an alternative home is key to long-term conservation of the species.

As a further precaution after the recent deaths, 33 lions from an adjoining forest range in Gir were also captured and quarantined; when they will be released back into the wild remains uncertain. And although forest officials asserted the epidemic had been contained, at least eight more lion corpses turned up in different parts of Gir since October, raising the recent toll to 31. (No cause has yet been confirmed for the latest eight deaths.)

WHAT WE KNOW

All known remaining members of the species Panthera leo persica—the Asiatic lion—are confined to Gir’s 1,880 square kilometers and roughly 18,000 square kilometers of human-dominated landscapes surrounding the sanctuary in the Indian state of Gujarat. The population rebounded from a mere 20 in 1913 to an estimated 600 at present, a source of much pride to the Gujarat government. But the protected area itself can only support about 300, so many lions live precariously outside of it—in fields and orchards interspersed with villages and towns, and crisscrossed by highways and railway tracks.

With development hemming them in, Asiatic lions routinely die in accidents. Since 2015 six were hit by trains and two by trucks, 13 fell into village wells and several others died of electrocution, according to the state government. (Many farmers use electric fences to fend off crop-threating wild animals such as deer and boar; lions occasionally get trapped in them and die.) Overall 184 lions perished in 2016 and 2017 as opposed to 310 over the preceding five years—a worrying jump in the mortality rate, even before the latest spate of deaths.

In early October researchers at India’s National Institute of Virology (NIV) and, separately, the College of Veterinary Sciences and Animal Husbandry examined blood and other samples from the dead lions. Confirming officials’ suspicions, they found CDV—a highly contagious airborne pathogen that usually infects members of the dog family—and Babesia, a tick-borne protozoan. The NIV team also recovered a complete CDV genome; alarmingly it turned out to be related to strains found in east Africa, where canine distemper in 1994 wiped out roughly 1,000 African lions, amounting to 30 percent of their population in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.

In the villages around Gir canine distemper is endemic to domestic dogs—a major food source for lions living outside the protected areas. “Lions could either have caught CDV directly from them or from other carnivores—hyenas, jackals or leopards,” says Hari Shankar Singh, a member of India’s Wildlife Board and a former administrator in Gujarat’s Department of Forests. At the NIV’s recommendation, the government vaccinated all the Gir lions they had quarantined.

But it remains unknown exactly how CDV spread to the Gir lions. The virus can be present in an animal without causing sickness or death, notes Meena Venkataraman, a Mumbai-based wildlife biologist who runs a consultancy organization called Carnivore Conservation and Research. A detailed examination of clinical symptoms, along with postmortems and other detailed tests, are necessary to establish the extent to which CDV is responsible—and also to answer multiple other questions such as the prevalence of the disease in both lions and domestic dogs, she says.

On October 31 a dead lion cub turned up on a farm near Gir. According to Dushyant Vasavada, chief conservator of forests (Junagadh Wildlife Circle), it died of respiratory and cardiac failure caused by severe anemia and dehydration. These are symptoms of heavy tick infestation, indicating the possibility of Babesia infection. “The outbreak of CDV and Babesia protozoa may not kill a majority of Gir’s lions, but their threat looms large,” Singh says. He believes the underlying problem is not so much the presence of microbes and parasites (which is only to be expected) but rather compromised immune systems. “When immunity is lowered against the attack of any virus, the attack of CDV and Babesiaturns fatal to the animal,” he says.

Whether or not immunity is in fact impaired—and if so, why—also remain open questions. In principle, inbreeding could lower immunity by highlighting any deleterious genes present in the existing population.

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Venkataraman doubts this is the case, however. Inbreeding can result in reduced survival rates for cubs; but she notes cub survival rates in Gir are comparable with or better than in similar habitats in Africa. Also, climatic factors such as drought can dry up water sources and make food hard to find, lowering immunity and aggravating infections.

THE WAY FORWARD

Once the latest outbreak is dealt with, India needs to institutionalize a response via disease management protocols, Venkataraman says. “We must have contingency planning; disease can occur,” she adds. “It’s our preparedness and honest evaluations of such situations that is critical.” She claims the Gujarat authorities currently have no action plan for preventing infections, screening for pathogens or dealing with disease outbreaks. Decisions such as vaccinating wild animals “should not be made at the 11th hour when animals are dying,” she says.

Ensuring the long-term survival of Asiatic lions would require further measures, Singh notes. These would include the intensive use of genetics, forensics and virology to swiftly detect and respond to disease outbreaks; restoring habitats in the areas around Gir; closely managing the lions to reduce interactions with domestic animals; and moving a few prides to alternative sites.

But Gujarat has habitually balked at any move to relocate any of the lions. Regarding the animals as part of the state’s exclusive heritage, it insists they are safe in Gir. In 2013 the Supreme Court of India directed the immediate transfer of a few lions to another wildlife sanctuary that had been readied to receive them. The Court stated that preserving an endangered species was of paramount importance, overriding matters of regional prestige—but Gujarat did not comply with the court order.

G. K. Sinha, the principal chief conservator of forest and head of Gujarat’s Forest Force, did not immediately respond to e-mailed questions about the state’s noncompliance and findings about the recent deaths.

Relocating some of the lions would maintain an ecological and biological distance between two populations—thus helping to avoid possible inbreeding and to contain the spread of epidemics, says Chellam—who in the 1990s led a committee of experts mandated by the Court to study moving Asiatic lions to a new sanctuary. The committee had suggested three alternative sites. Of them, the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh State—which lies 300 miles east of Gir and has historically been part of the range of Asiatic lions—was found to be best suited for their re-introduction.

With Gujarat showing no sign of relenting, however, the threat that the Asiatic lion could be extinguished by the latest crisis or by future ones remains a possibility. It is risky to “keep all eggs in one basket” irrespective of their numbers, Chellam says: “You’ll lose all the eggs if you drop the basket.”

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'This is the darkest period of our life'

What would Vishal do today, if he were alive? Perhaps the teenager would fly kites, or play with his friends. Maybe he’d work with his father on the family’s two-acre field or pick up an odd job for a daily wage as he occasionally did. He wanted new clothes, his parents remember. That’s all he had asked for.

But Vishal Khule died last November, just 10 days after Diwali, by consuming a bottle of weedicide that his father had bought a few days earlier to spray on their crops. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and blue pants that day, the police report says. Vishal was not yet 16 years old.

In Akola’s Dadham village: Vishal's father, Vishwanath Khule and his distraught mother Sheela (on the right); elder brother Vaibhav and their neighbour Jankiram Khule, Vishal’s ‘kaka’ (on the left) (Others)

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“He collapsed here,” said his father, Vishwanath Khule, pointing to a spot beneath the window of the two-room shanty where the family lives. “His mother was in the adjoining kitchen, making chapatis. I was out there,” he added, gesturing toward the front yard. When her son collapsed with a thump, Sheela Khule rushed out to find Vishal lying on the floor, “a white fluid oozing out of his mouth.” The can of weedicide lay by his side, empty. Vishal died before reaching the hospital.

Part of the two-room home where Vishal consumed a bottle of weedicide (Others)

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“This is the darkest period of our life,” Vishwanath said.

Dadham, with a population of 1,500, is among the poorest villages in this region. It is about 25 kilometres from Akola, a major city in western Vidarbha, Maharashtra’s cotton- and soybean-growing belt, which has been in the news since the mid-1990s for a continuing spell of farmers’ suicides. The region is reeling under successive years of drought and an agrarian crisis that has only gone from bad to worse.

While the unabated spell of farmers’ suicides in rural Vidarbha and Marathwada, Maharashtra’s eastern and central regions, has been reported on and acknowledged by the government, a related tragedy has gone all but unnoticed: suicides by the young children of debt-ridden farmers. (Farmers’ children have taken their own lives in the past, but newspaper reports indicate that the incidence has spiked in the past two years.)

While there is no specific data on suicides by children (under 18; or by youth under 20), in India as a result of agrarian distress, several studies and reports – from the 2005 door-to-door study commissioned by the Maharashtra government to subsequent studies on farm distress and suicides by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research – have pointed to the impact of debt and distress on children in peasant households. Many adolescent children of farmers inherit their parents’ debts and are forced to take on adult responsibilities, dropping out of school, tilling the fields, succumbing to depression, and for girls, being married off early so the family has one less mouth to feed.

Over the past decade, this writer has documented several such suicides, particularly in households where a suicide has already occurred. Sometimes farmers’ children commit suicide because they fear that if they don’t, their parents will, a phenomenon is known as ‘altruistic suicide’. In one particularly poignant case in 2005, 19-year-old Neeta Bhopat hanged herself in Aasra village in Maharashtra.

In a neatly written suicide note in Marathi, she said: “If I don’t commit suicide, my father will [take his own life]; my family can’t even earn a thousand rupees a month. I have two younger sisters. My parents can’t bear the burden of our marriages when we don’t have enough to eat. So I am taking my life.” Nobody should be held responsible for her decision, she wrote. Committing suicide was the only way she could relieve her parents of some of their tension.

Scarcity and struggle

With a few months to go before the next kharif (monsoon) crops sprout, Dadham is still coming to terms with Vishal Khule’s suicide. Severe water scarcity is already testing the villagers this summer. The entire vicinity is arid. Local newspaper reports suggest that the groundwater table has fallen alarmingly. Dadham has to wait for tankers to supply water every alternate day, or people must trek several kilometres to fetch drinking water. And as if this is not difficult enough, no work is available in the village.

“This is the worst year” of a three-season drought, said Akola district collector G. Sreekanth in his office earlier this year. “We began preparing for the coming summer in September last [year],” he added, even before the 2015 monsoon had officially ended.

Like many districts in the Marathwada, Vidarbha and western regions of Maharashtra last year, Akola district received only 60 per cent of its average annual rainfall of 692 mm. “That’s around 500 mm rains,” said Sreekanth, “which may not sound all that bad, but we got 400 mm of that in two days, on August 4 and 5.” This meant the fields flooded and rainwater could not percolate into the ground.

Such a downpour and a long gap between rainy days is a new and alarming feature of the changing monsoon pattern, according to studies by the Indian Meteorological Department and Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and other research institutions studying climatic aberrations. After August 5 last year, Akola didn’t see another drop of rain for 41 days, a devastatingly long dry spell. “Every crop failed: soybeans, cotton and tur,” the collector added.

With no crops to sell, and domestic expenses and other exigencies to meet, the Khule family borrowed from moneylenders. According to their bank records, they also have unpaid bank loans of about Rs. 50,000 over the last five years.

The Khules, who belong to the close-knit tribal Andh clan, are marginal peasant farmers. They have long been living hand-to-mouth, and Vishal Khule’s death has only made life more precarious. His mother barely speaks, recounts their neighbour, Jankinath Khule, who recently retired from the government service as a naib tehsildar (a minor-rank revenue official). Vishal’s two sisters, both married, are taking turns to return to the home to be with their mother, he said. Vishal’s elder brother, 18-year-old Vaibhav, has dropped out of school after Class 10 and has taken to working odd jobs.

When her son collapsed with a thump, Sheela Khule rushed out of the kitchen to find Vishal lying on the floor (Others)

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According to Jankinath Khule, a village elder, Vishal’s suicide was the culmination of his growing frustration with poverty, combined with a feeling of helplessness.

“He would often talk with me about the village poverty and the difference between him and his schoolmates,” said Khule, who Vishal affectionately called Khule kaka (uncle). “[Vishal] spoke of his parents’ troubles, and was resigned to the fact that this situation would never end.”

During the Diwali holidays in recent years, Vishal and Vaibhav would help their father in the fields. In 2015, the kharif crops – mainly soybean – had failed. Though the lentils they grew fetched a good price, inadequate rainfall had affected the yields. Vishal’s father planted green gram in winter, thanks to the state government’s distribution of free seeds to struggling farmers. But the relief measure did not work, villagers said, as there was no water or moisture in the soil to nurture the crop.

With no work in the fields, Vishwanath Khule said, the brothers went to Akola over the school break with friends to find a job that would pay a daily wage but came back empty-handed. Vishal was upset that he could not afford a pair of new clothes for himself, says Khule kaka, or help his father with the cash crunch.

Vishal’s was not the only suicide of its kind. Last October, Latur district, about 400 kilometres from Akola, reported a suicide by the 17-year-old daughter of a farmer, a student in junior college.

In her note, Swati Pitale explained in some detail why she was committing suicide. She could no longer suffer the plight of her father, she wrote in Marathi and didn’t want to be a burden on him. She would soon be of marriageable age and didn’t want her father to incur additional expenses on her wedding. In the note, she made a plea to the banks and moneylenders her father owed. She asked them not to harass her father, for, she said, he would surely repay his debts once her elder sister was married.

Swati had stopped attending college for a while, as her monthly bus pass had run out and her parents did not have the money to renew it. Her mother borrowed Rs. 260 for the pass from a neighbour, but Swati had missed crucial classes and wasn’t able to take the exam.

According to reports in the local newspapers, when Swati consumed pesticide in her family’s fields in the village of Kingaon, her father had left home for Karnataka, in search of work.

Back in Dadham, Vaibhav looks nervous. He says he must work to keep the firewood burning. At 18, he is now his father’s last hope – and perhaps his only support.

This article was originally published on 07/ 05/2016 on the People's Archive of Rural India.

Photo Credit: Jaideep Hardikar

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RT @journohardy: Pesticide poisoning. My first story in BBC today. BBC News - The Indian farmers falling prey to pesticide https://t.co/rKqA2j5hBn

Pesticide poisoning. My first story in BBC today. BBC News - The Indian farmers falling prey to pesticide https://t.co/rKqA2j5hBn

— Jaideep Hardikar (@journohardy) October 5, 2017

via Twitter https://twitter.com/nishit_smokeinc October 05, 2017 at 06:44PM

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Since 2010 till July 2018, about 330 people have died in Maharashtra in wildlife attacks, mostly by tigers and leopards; as many as 1,234 were seriously injured and 2,776 people suffered minor injuries, according to the data compiled by the wildlife wing of the Maharashtra Forest Department. While the data is state-wide, a majority of these incidents were reported from around the tiger reserves and sanctuaries in Vidarbha. In the same time span, at least 40 tigers are believed to have been poached by organised gangs in Vidarbha, four ‘problem’ tigers were killed by the forest department in the last 10 years, several others had to be captured and sent to zoos or rescue centres in Nagpur and Chandrapur, and many others were electrocuted to death.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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Summers are usually a time when people step into the forests to collect tendu leaves. It is also when tigers are roaming in search of water and prey, both of which are becoming scarcer outside the protected reserves. And there’s a teeming population of sub-adult tigers (those still less than three years old), trying to establish their territories. Far from the growing tourist attraction of Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR), the battle of survival for wild animals amid a growing human population in their forests is turning dramatic and bloodier with every passing year.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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A 37-page report, Forest fragments in eastern Vidarbha Landscape, Maharashtra – The Tig-Saw puzzle, was released in July 2018. It finds that there are only six patches of forests – each more than 500 square kilometres – in the entire region that could be said to be ideal habitats for the tigers. Of them, four such contiguous belts are in Gadchiroli, a district long torn by conflict, which does not have tiger population. A significant majority of the other forest patches are tiny – less than 5 square kilometres, and aren’t considered tiger habitats. The Central Indian Landscape (CIL) and Eastern Ghats have been identified as a global priority landscape for tiger conservation, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) report says. These areas support about 18 per cent of the global tiger population. According to the 2016 global data, there are 3,900 tigers left in the wild (and an unknown number in captivity).  The central Indian tiger population suffers from the highly fragmented corridors and loss of habitat to agriculture, the report stresses.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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The 2011 Tiger Estimation report, by the Ministry of Forests and Environment, warned of escalating human-tiger conflicts, pointing to the fact that most of India’s reproducing tigers were now concentrated in 10 per cent of all tiger habitats. Officials expect a further rise in the population, signalling even bigger human-tiger confrontations. The increasing tigers are spilling out of the reserves, and into the villages.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) report says: "Eastern Vidarbha has a total forest cover of 22, 508 square kilometres, which is roughly 35 per cent of the total geographical area, with a population of about 200 tigers or more, both inside and outside Pas [protected areas].” This area is dissected by 45,790 kilometres of roads (as on March 2016) with consists of national highways, state highways, district roads and village roads, the report says. The fragmentation caused by roads has created 517 small new forest patches which are less than one square kilometre and cover a total area of 246.38 square kilometres. “More than human beings, development projects have snapped the natural tiger corridors and dispersal routes in Vidarbha,” says Bandu Dhotre, a conservation activist who runs an NGO called Eco-Pro in Chandrapur.

Jaideep Hardikar, ‘Where will the tigers go?', People's Archive of Rural India

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Source of the rivers, scams of the rulers

He is a strawberry farmer in his late 70s. The dug well on his three acres in old Mahabaleshwar is stone dry. His wife and he struggle to keep the farm going. They manage to, as there is still some water in their borewell. But even that little he shares, free of charge, with the temple bordering their land. The severe drought hurts his yield but not his generosity. His name is Yunus Ismail Nalaband – and he gives that water to the Krishnamai temple, the oldest symbol of the source of the Krishna river in Satara district, quite cheerfully.

“Is it really my water?” he asks. “It all belongs to the uparwala [the Almighty], does it not?” His wife, Roshan Nalaband, also in her 70s, nods approvingly. They’re both packing their strawberries in little boxes. “The traders will come by to pick them up,” says Roshan. “The prices are higher this year because of scarcity, but that is offset by a poorer yield and lesser quality of the crop.” They speak, without pausing at work, of the way the water crisis is hurting them. Only Roshan breaks off for a minute to give us some water and offer us further refreshments.

Yunus Nalaband and his wife Roshan Nalaband: Small farmers, growing mainly strawberries on their three acres. (Others)

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Completely dried-out well of Yunus Nalaband and his wife Roshan Nalaband. (Others)

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The kunda (temple tank) at the Krishnamai is empty except when it gets water from the Nalabands’ borewell. The tank went dry this season. The Krishnamai is just a few minutes’ walk from the more-visited Panchganga temple, also regarded as the symbolic source of the Krishna and four other rivers – Koyna, Venna, Savitri and Gayatri. Their actual sources are not too far from here. The Krishnamai itself is probably the oldest temple in the Wai-Mahabaleshwar region. A beautiful little one, seen by locals as the home of the river goddess.

The Krishnamai temple in Old Mahabaleshwar: the little ‘kunda’ in front of it is dry for the first time in living memory. (Others)

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My friend and colleague Jaideep Hardikar and I, together with other journalists in each of the districts we visited, went to the source – symbolic or actual – of several rivers in Maharashtra in the month of May. The idea was to journey downstream each river and talk to farmers, labourers and others living along these routes. To listen to them speak about how the mega water crisis – much larger than a meteorological drought – is affecting their lives.

While it is normal for some parts of rivers to run dry in summer, this is now happening even in their source regions, along stretches where they have never dried up. “Maharashtra’s once perennial rivers have significantly been converted into seasonal ones,” says Prof. Madhav Gadgil, who headed the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. “Amongst the reasons for this have been large-scale damming and a host of other activities along the course and basins of these rivers,” says the leading ecologist and writer.

“In six decades, I have not seen the kunda of the Krishnamai empty and dry,” says Narayan Zade. That’s in a region with an annual average rainfall of close to 2,000 mm. A retired tourist guide and migrant worker, Zade spends his days sitting around this temple. He is clear though that the drought isn’t just about the rainfall. He says tourists and outsiders – “you people” – have much to answer for.

“Of course there has been major deforestation,” he says. “But not by locals. If one of us here cuts a couple of branches, he goes to jail. But people from outside cut and take truckloads of timber – they get away with it.” While Zade too has worked as a tour guide, he says unregulated tourism has done great damage: “…all those resorts and places have come up” causing further loss of green cover. Now, he prefers the quiet Krishnamai to the Panchganga temple bustling with tourists.

Narayan Zade at the Krishnamai temple. He blames outsiders –‘you people’ – for deforestation, overcrowding and other activities that add to the water scarcity. (Others)

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The temple’s front yard has a spectacular spot overlooking the Dhom Balkawadi dam. It still has some water, but much less than it should, even for this time of the year. Years of damming and major diversions of water along the river have had an impact. There is also the chaos of never-to-be-completed lift irrigation schemes. These are at the core of the state’s “irrigation scam”.

Quite a few villages that were meant to gain from those insanely expensive schemes, but never did, are in the Khatav and Maan tehsils of Satara. The Ner dam and lake in that district are meant to supply water, both for drinking and irrigation, to a much larger number of villages, but the supply is mostly cornered by sugarcane cultivators in just 19 villages nearby. Ner is about 80 kilometres downstream from the Krishnamai.

The Ner lake and dam in Satara district: even water meant for drinking is monopolised by sugarcane growers in just 19 nearby villages. (Others)

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Besides Maan and Khatav, 11 other very dry tehsils here are spread across three districts – Satara, Sangli and Solapur. People from these tehsils confer each year in what they call adushkaal parishad (drought council). “They are demanding, among other things, a ‘Maan desh’, a separate ‘drought district’ comprising these 13 tehsils ,” says Dr. Maruti Ramakrishna Katkar, a retired district medical officer.

“Their present districts give them little say in anything,” says Katkar. But how would ‘seceding’ to form a new district help them? The old districts would be glad to see them go and be even less answerable to them, surely? He puts one of the leaders of the new ‘drought district’ movement, Prof. Krishna Ingole, on the phone with us. Ingole says the shared interests of the people in that region bind them together and districthood will enhance their bargaining power.

“These tehsils are about 1,000 feet above sea level and in a rain shadow zone,” Katkar says. “We have less than 30 rainy days annually. All our areas have seen major migrations. There are gold and jewellery workers among the migrants who send back remittances that keep the local economy going.”

The water crisis is not a problem of the last year or two. Nor of a single big drought. It has built over the decades, driven largely by human hand. Why, asks retired irrigation engineer Sharad Mande in Pune, are there no long-term measures to deal with it? He answers his own question: “The life of dams is 80-90 years. The life of pipelines is 35-40 years. That of water treatment plants – about 25-30 years. Of pumping machinery, 15 years. But the life of a chief minister is five years. There is no credit for the long-term action. Only for what you do immediately.”

Between 2000 and 2010, official data show, the state’s irrigation potential increased by just 0.1 per cent. That, after spending Rs. 70,000 crores on irrigation during the same decade. Over half of that, going by the findings of the Chitale Committee that probed the irrigation scam, may have been siphoned off on dud schemes.

In Maharashtra, official and Right to Information-accessed data show, the cost of a dam can increase by 500 per cent within a month after a contract for it is awarded. Or by nearly 1,000 per cent within six months. As many as 77 projects have been “under execution” for over 30 years. Cost overruns are bigger than the budgets of some small Indian states put together.

Groundwater is also running low in Maharashtra, where 65 per cent of the net irrigation is based on this resource. The state’s ban in April 2016 on the sinking of borewells below 200 feet comes three decades too late.

Even the drinking water problem is far greater than it ought to be in regions along the Krishna river’s course. A lot of water gets diverted to construction activity. There are rural to urban transfers, and agriculture to industry diversions.

Within agriculture, most of the water is monopolised by sugarcane. Even Ner lake water intended for drinking gets diverted to that crop. Two-thirds of Maharashtra’s cane is grown in drought-prone regions. As for the sugar factories, “Please don’t call them that,” Mande grumbles. “They are MLA factories – that’s what they produce.”

Each acre of sugarcane uses up to 180 acre-inches of water in a year – that is, almost 18 million litres – apart from normal rainfall. An acre of irrigated hybrid jowar requires barely 10 per cent of that. A lot of people are not attacking sugarcane per se. Just grow it in regions that have the water for it, they say. Not in zones of scarcity. Cane is cultivated on 4 per cent of the land, but consumes 70 per cent of irrigation water in Maharashtra.

“This dugwell of ours has never been dry in six decades,” says Yunus Nalaband, back in Mahabaleshwar. He and Roshan continue packing their strawberries. Mahabaleshwar accounts for close to 80 per cent of the country’s strawberry production. The two gift us a few strawberries and even some black mulberry fruit.

Barely a hundred yards in front of us is the Krishnamai temple that they supply free water too. Behind us are the three acres they still cultivate. But with water running out, these may not be, unlike in the nostalgic Beatles song, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

Yunus and Roshan struggle to cultivate in the drought period but share the little water they get from their borewell with the Kirshnamai temple. (Others)

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This article was originally published on 25/ 05/2016 on the People's Archive of Rural India.

  Photo Credit: P. Sainath

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Across the world, over a quarter of earnings from raw cotton production comes from government support to the sector - in other words, subsidies. Official support to the cotton sector is greatest in the US, followed by China and the European Union.

Jaideep Hardikar, 'Subsidising Suicides', InfoChange

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Globally, more than 70 countries produce and export cotton. Of these, just eight countries are responsible for almost 80% of global output: China, the United States, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Brazil and Australia. Cotton remains the world’s single most important fibre in textile production, with a share of about 40%.

Jaideep Hardikar, 'Subsidising Suicides', InfoChange