Harvests of Deceit

We are into the seventh consecutive year of drought declared in the Indira Gandhi canal command area in the districts of Bikaner and Jaisalmer of western Rajasthan. In these areas ‘drought’ never really went off the ground since last year though ‘famine relief’ has been on with different agencies like the phed, cada, drda, badep and other favourite institutions of local governance acting as nodal agencies for execution of these relief works. Despite a quarter century of hydro-managerial feats of the Indian State’s ‘greening the desert’, and ‘making the desert bloom’, the majority of settlers of the canal project have to engage in the gruelling labour of digging earth, weeding out bushes and trees, planting wind and sand-breaker bushes along desert trails and roads in the interiors of the command area near the Indo-Pak border, all to earn a meagre daily bread for their families. It’s been hard all these years and even this year, there seems to be no respite.

Many have been forced to migrate to other parts of Rajasthan and north Gujarat. Since last year the district administration in Bikaner has prided over sanctioning the highest number of famine relief works for covering the ‘water channels’ in chaks, to avoid their getting clogged by sand, in the hope that water would flow through them unabated. Indeed, a noble and innovative intervention. But the vexed question is — where is all that water needed for this labyrinthine network of field water channels going to come from?

Farmers have been collecting in hundreds and thousands in the, Indira Gandhi Nehar Project (IGNP,) Stage I, at Birdhwal Head and other areas in Anupgarh and Ganganagar tehsils of Ganganagar district. They have been fairly voluble and organised about their defiance and demands for their ‘rights’ in the IGNP, the Gang and the Bhakra systems. There have been rallies, mahasabhas, demonstrations, gheraos, state-level conventions demanding more water and electricity. Majority of these farmers’ protests have been led by progressive trade unions and Left parties; these districts have been the traditional bastions of cpi(m). Most of the farmers participating in these protests are middle to big peasants, backed by a number of traders’ associations, who have always favoured resource-intensive agriculture on the lines of the green revolution model in Punjab.

In these better endowed tracts the hold of capital over land and water is complete, generating increasing consumption of water, electricity and all the other resources needed for a type of farming that has little option but to follow the dictates of the market. There have also been protest meetings at the Kanwar Sain lift scheme, the infamous area of water-logging. The farmers there do not want to be left behind in this race for a finite resource: water. The farmers’ agitation in Khajuwala in late 2004, that turned bloody, is symbolic of the times to come. Khajuwala is the last point of the established canal command area of Stage I and the beginning of fragile and doomed canal areas of Stage II.

The situation of a large majority of settlers in the canal areas of the IGNP Stage II, whose command area is proposed to double to 4.79 lakh hectare area in Stage I, is worse. Not only has there been acute water scarcity, the decrepit plight of the settlers is worsened by problems around land resources. A reconnaissance survey carried out by the UN agency fao, way back in the 1960s, had indicated that more than 40 percent land was not fit for cultivation, especially for the dream of water intensive cash crops that the State sold indiscriminately to the settlers. Notwithstanding the findings of this and many other surveys, land settlement policies have been a recipe for a full-blown land market based on speculation and coercion. The State has played to the hilt the ‘peasant instinct to colonise the land’. During the last decade of the 20th century, land markets, both over and underground, have operated in full swing in Stage II.

Since the severe drought cycle of 1999-2000, a process of de-peasantisation has occurred with unseen rapidity. The rank of wage earners has swelled and bigger landholders have grown in significant numbers, having amassed more land at their expense. Many small and marginal farmers, the original poor and landless allottees, have been struggling to save their land from being pawned or sold off. The demands at the farmer agitations in Pugal, Bajju and Kolayat in Bikaner district and Nachna, Mohnagarh and Jaisalmer in IGNP Stage II, resonate with these horrid daily realities. Apart from demands of their share of water, they have been demanding concessions regarding deferring the payment of instalments of their agricultural land as well. In these forsaken canal command areas, the conflicts over water takes place at a daily level, at every point of distribution, down to the tail ends of minors, the sub minors and the field water channels, the lowest rung of the hydraulic hierarchy.

The logic of cowboy economics, of might is right, grabbing land and water, is sounding louder. The laudable Participatory Irrigation Management, one of the populist Plan recommendations and the National Water Policy of 1987, which sought to give more participation rights to farmers, big and small, has been dumped. In the IGNP and Ganga and the Bhakra system of canals, the affected farmers have been relegated to a subservient role to a recipe for privatisation serving the interests of the rural elite.

Perhaps it is time to act seriously about carving ecologically sustainable, equitable and just solutions to this ‘insatiable greed for water’, farmers have been doomed to. For the majority of farmers and settlers of the IGNP Stage II area, the compulsions for resource intensive land and water use practices nurtured by the compulsions of the market and capital are only going to produce ‘harvests of deceit’ — year after year.

This article was first published in Tehelka, on September 24 , 2005