As
a river dies: India could be facing its ‘greatest human
catastrophe’ ever
As
crops and farmers die, experts blame a man-made “drought of common
sense” for the drying up of Southern India’s Cauvery River, once
a lifeline to millions. Insight investigates.
25 July, 2017
INDIA:
Much of the once bountiful and lush-green rice fields was reduced to
a dry, yellow-brown landscape, after successive years of scanty
rainfall and severe drought.
For
farmer Mr Vijayakumar, 52, the rice crop was his family’s sole
source of income. Hit by the double whammy of crop failure and
mounting debts, he took a lonely walk to the edge of his two-acre
rice field in Tamil Nadu in January this year.
There
the tough, rugged man, used to the hard toil of a farmer for decades,
hanged himself from a nearby tree.
“He
was constantly worrying about the debts,” said his wife
Vijayakumari, who is now struggling to cope with the loss of her
husband and their escalating debts. “His mind was never at peace.
He kept saying that there were so many debts to repay and he was
worried about how his only son was going to manage all that.”
Mr
Vijayakumar had borrowed from moneylenders to pay for his daughter’s
wedding and for fertilisers for his crops which didn’t grow, she
told the Channel NewsAsia programme Insight.
He
is just one of roughly 350 farmers who have died in Tamil Nadu in
recent months, according to unofficial estimates. In the past 20
years, more than 300,000 indebted farmers in India have committed
suicide - many due to family debts, reported The Hindu newspaper.
PEOPLE
ARE LOSING HOPE
Years
of scanty and inadequate rainfall have led to the drying up of water
reservoirs and village water bodies in southern India, especially the
grain-growing regions of Tamil Nadu which is facing its worse drought
in 140 years.
Water
activist Dr Rajendra Singh said: “We have not seen a drought of
this intensity before. People have lost hope in life and are
committing suicide.”
“People
are leaving the villages and moving to the cities… They don’t
have food to eat and water to drink. There is no fodder for the
livestock,” added the winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the
Stockholm Water Prize.
The
once-mighty 800km Cauvery River, a major lifeline in southern India
on which millions of farmers depend, has turned into dust tracts in
several sections before it trickles down to the Bay of Bengal.
Dense
forests once helped to retain water on the hill slopes, enabling slow
percolation into the streams that feed the river. But widespread
deforestation along the Cauvery Basin has led to soil erosion and a
reduction in rainfall.
image:
Scientist
and environmentalist Dr Vandana Shiva pointed out that the region
gets only four months of rain during the monsoons, during which in
ideal circumstances, the water would be naturally stored in the humus
and earth of the forests.
“But
if you don’t store it, the rain comes, causes a flood, and you have
a drought,” she said.
“The
second reason is that there is an over extraction (of water) beyond
the capacity of the river. That extraction is leaving the river dry.”
SMALL
RIVERS DRYING UP
Dr
Shiva also blames the government’s ambitious scheme that aims to
link Indian rivers by a network of reservoirs and canals, with dams
diverting the flow from areas with a water surplus.
She
said: “There’s this assumption that you can have bigger and
bigger cities and you can divert water from hundreds and thousands of
miles away.
To take all the rivers in India and divert them to the cities and industrial areas - all rivers will die.
Critics
argue that damming the rivers will cause coastal erosion,
deforestation and the displacement of people, and exacerbate the
impact of climate change.
Dr
Singh pointed out that the introduction of centralised irrigation
systems and large dams have led to serious soil erosion. while the
over-extraction of underground aquifers depleted the water table.
“There
was no more water to be drawn from under the ground, and the water at
the top flowed away with the soil, causing erosion and silting,” he
said. “All the small rivers are dying.”
Bauxite
mining has also wreaked havoc and contributed to a collapse of
groundwater levels.
Environmental
activist Mr Piyush Manush said that the rampant extraction of bauxite
– from which aluminium is produced - from the Servarayan Hills has
led to an environmental disaster.
Bauxite
absorbs rainwater and slowly releases water into the streams. But the
extraction of bauxite has left the hills bare and arid. “If the
hill is undisturbed, the bauxite and other minerals inside act as a
sponge to absorb water and release it slowly.
“Now,
if you chop the hill for bauxite, the hill gets hardened with
exposure to sunlight. And once it hardens, it loses that sponge
effect,” he said.
DEBT
DESPERATION AND SUICIDE
Faced
with the water crisis and their crop failures, desperate farmers have
turned to money lenders for loans to buy food, seeds, fertiliser and
equipment.
These
money lenders charge exorbitant interest rates and as debts pile up,
farmers often find themselves unable to cope with the pressure. Some
think that by killing themselves, they can save their families - but
moneylenders don’t stop hounding the survivors.
“We
still have debts that we haven't been able to repay. None of our
debts have been cancelled,” said Madam Vijayakumari.
Not
far from her village, another rice farmer Mr Ashokan, 55, was also
troubled by the same thoughts of crippling debt and destruction of
crops.
He
went to the bank to get another loan to buy pesticides and
fertilisers, but collapsed and died while standing in line. His
widow, Madam Vedhavalli, believes he died due to the stress of his
crop failures.
In
April, distressed and angry drought-hit farmers from Tamil Nadu took
to the streets of Indian capital New Delihi to protest, demanding
farm loan waivers. A few state governments have conceded, agreeing to
waive their loans amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
But
farmers like Mr Gnanaprakasam, 59, in Samudayam village still feel
threatened, with upstream states like Karnataka refusing to share
Cauvery River’s water with neighbouring Tamil Nadu.
Water
wars broke out after Karnataka refused to comply with India’s
Supreme Court ruling that it release more water, leading to violence
on the streets, reported the Hindustan Times. If Karnataka doesn’t
accede, Mr Gnanaprakasam said:
The districts of Thanjavur, Tiruvarur and Nagapattinam will transform into deserts. All the crops will be destroyed.
“Farmers
and labourers will leave the village without a choice. That's already
happening now. Many farmers have lost their lives. They have died out
of shock. Some have committed suicide.”
FOR
NOW, A COMMUNITY SOLUTION?
Dr
Singh, also known as India’s Water Man, has been fighting an uphill
battle to revive water bodies and rivers in the semi-arid region of
Rajasthan for more than 30 years. He has set up more than 8,000 water
tanks and revived seven rivers in Rajasthan.
In
Alwar district, about 200km from Delhi, he has used path-breaking
water conservation techniques to bring water back to more than 1,000
villages. He believes local water preservation and community-driven
water management systems are the only ways to end the “terrible
disaster”.
He
said:
The solution to this is community-driven decentralised water management. This is a solution that the government is not looking to implement. They are only looking at large dams and centralised irrigation systems - which are the main reasons for this drought.
Dr
Sunita Narain, director general of the India-based research institute
the Centre for Science and Environment, believes that Tamil Nadu
needs to augment its water supply through a decentralised water
harvesting system.
This means building water tanks, and going back to
the traditions of harvesting water, restoring and recharging every
lake and pond in Tamil Nadu.
She
also thinks that the state needs to move away from water intensive
crops such as sugar cane.
“Third,
make every industry and city in Tamil Nadu water-wise, so you use
less water and you recharge and recharge every drop of water the
Singapore way. It has to be a combination of all three,” she said.
For
the farmers’ widows like Vijayakumari and Vedhavalli, it may be a
case of too little, too late.
“Saving
the Cauvery River is akin to saving the lives of the farmers,” said
Ms Vedhavalli. “We are afraid to go ahead with anything now. We
can't depend on the rain for anything.
“Rain
only comes occasionally. At times, when there's too much rain, we
suffer from floods. Now we are facing drought.”
Watch
the Insight special on ‘India’s
Dry Rivers’ here.
