MNREGA in Indira Gandhi Canal, Thar

As the first decade of the 20^th century comes to a close amidst apocalyptic climate change pronouncements of doomsday for the Gaia, the metropolis and the cityscapes prepare for yet another celebration of New Year. With semblances of recovery from ‘economic recession’ coffered up by State protectionism and false hopes of the ruling and market elite, all night parties and midnight balls are round the corner. Bikaner, the medieval desert township located in the interiors of the Thar, too gears up for the New Year bash, with all the glitter of the newly come up swanky showrooms of major labels and upcoming shopping malls that promises an illusion of successful transition to modern tastes away from seasoned Bikaneri bhujias, sweets and the rustic market lanes of the Kot Gate, Station Road and KEM road. The bewitching displays laden with desires and fantasies are an open invitation for hedonistic plunge nurtured by complacency syndromes of all is well and business as usual that keeps the middle classes apathetic, atomized and snugly locked up in their own ivory towers or castles. Compare this phantasmagoria of opulence with the grim realities of the IGNP canal command area where settlers eke out their daily survival and battle with one of the worst droughts of the century and get ready to cope up with the long winter of misery and destitution that is in the offing.

Conceived by the genius civil engineer Kanwar Sain in 1948 and ideologically propped up by Nehru as the ‘kingpin’ of state planning for developing the desert, the Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojna (IGNP) was started in 1960s and more than 3200 million rupees had already been spent on the canal network till 2008. The 445 km long lined main canal with its nine branches, seven lift schemes and a network of more than 8500 sq km of canal network make it the largest multi purpose canal project in the world. In addition to irrigating around 9.6 lakh hectares of land, the IGNP is meant to provide drinking water to 3,461 villages and 29 towns in seven desert districts of western Rajasthan. That these staggering costs and awesome statistics have produced a unique and unparalleled development spectacle is without doubt. The most ambitious opening of the Thar since Independence, settlers were brought in from various places to populate a desert that had four settlements per 100 sq. km. With the advent of the canal there are numerous settlements with more than 2000 settlers. The new life line of the desert, the perennial water stream has aided the growth of human settlements and laid preconditions for a radical transformation from a predominantly pastoral to a settled life. In desert that had grasslands and a rudimentary rainfed agriculture in patches the canal has aided cropping of wheat, cotton, groundnut, pulses. It would not be inappropriate to say that the canal has solved the drinking water crisis in a water scarce region.

But this stupendous conquest of nature has not been without its perils and pitfalls. The state has been unabashed in pursuing a skewed paradigm that sliced the desert commons into individual farm plots in which the pristine and organic desert land was subjected to high inputs of water, fertilizers and pesticides in an effort to script a green revolution of the Punjab type. The tragedy is that this green revolution type growth controlled by cow boy economics of might is right has been highly inequitable and has given rise to new inequalities.

The socialist gestures of the Nehruvian legacy of giving land to the landless who would diligently work to settle the desert seem like a faint echo from the past, a fuzzy basket of jettisoned promises. Instead the State has played to hilt the ‘peasant instinct to colonise the land’, churning out recipes for high input intensive farming and the growth of a full blown land market that has an ugly underbelly populated by a greedy land mafia. The peculiar credit and speculation-oriented cash economy of the command area has precipitated increasing debt burden on the farmers. As the stacks of Kisan Credit Cards in the local banks would testify increasing majority of farmers are being seduced to pawn their lands for repaying already accumulated debts of the bania and meeting daily costs of survival in these bleak times. Many of the ordinary allotees have been flattened into agricultural labour at the cost of a mere 10-15 % who have made it to the middle or big ranks of the peasantry owning more than 500 to 100 bighas as against a mere 25 bighas (6.2 hectares) of land promised to the ordinary settlers who survive through a variety of wage and labour sharing arrangements, some bordering dangerously close to sub human feudal practices of servitude and bondage. These rich kulaks the new lords of the canal fiefdom after grabbing most of the good agricultural lands are now eyeing mining of limestone, investing their usurped surplus into buying fleets of trucks and setting up illegal units.

During the severe drought of 2000 it was the first time the govt. hesitatingly had to declare the IGNP canal command area as affected. In the last few years what had added to these water woes is a structural water scarcity in the canal system because of the increasing claims by different states like Punjab, Harayana and even Himachal Pradesh who vie with each other over the conquest of Indus waters. The production of kharif crop has been really low in the last three four years. The myth of irrigated farming was somehow assuaged by an average winter crop all these years. The grueling water crisis this year have plunged the command area to an all time low with no kharif crop and feeble rabi crop reduced to more than half and in many cases only one fourth of what it used to be in the previous years. The state is somehow managing the show by a rationed quota of three water turns only as compared to six or eight that the farmers had been getting earlier. The tentacles of rumors about the worsening water crisis are fast spreading sending bone chilling shivers among the farmers who see no option other than plunging into localized water wars and bloody protests. The drudgery is compounded by an acute scarcity of fodder and a fuelwood crisis that are telling signs of a future of despair.

It is already two months from the time the Govt had declared drought and promised to open drought relief works. Apart from sporadic sanctions of fodder depots the state has not done much except buying time and spreading confusion with its potent mix of NREGA that has given a new lease of life to state sponsored indebtedness and corruption. The newly found fascination for bricks and pucca work under NREGA reaffirms a pale worn out logic of creating infrastructural assets for Development pandering as modern conquest, creating more and more exclusion and facilitating the onslaught on the fragile biosphere of the Thar.

As the techno bureaucrats and the rich kulaks, the de facto owners of the new canal fiefdom, get ready with their toasts for the new year resolutions to renew their commitments of keeping the rhetoric of irrigated farming alive and pursuing their profit maximization drives more vigorously, for the subaltern settler whose world has already been turned upside down the serpentine labyrinth rolling on the chests of Thar ceaselessly rehearses a tragedy exposing the farcical claims of a post colonial state with its bandwagon of formulas for development.

Photographs: Deepak Verma

See a version of this article in

HARDNEWS January 2010 click here