Ploughing in the hope of rain raises clouds of dust in sun-baked Marathwada. Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole
Ploughing in the hope of rain raises clouds of dust in sun-baked Marathwada. Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole

Climate change


The global collective of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been saying this is exactly one of the main impacts of climate change – fewer rainy days, but heavier rainfall on those days. The India Meteorological Department is well aware of the need to predict rainfall distribution more accurately and over smaller areas – and it does have a service called Agrimet that provides a five-day rainfall forecast and cropping advisories. But the scientists are also aware that they need more weather stations for higher accuracy and money is always a problem.

Borade is confident that if the monsoon rainfall in Marathwada is even 80% to 90% of the long-period average, dryland crops are hardy enough to flourish, as long as the rainfall is evenly spread. Right now, he is doing what every dryland farmer in India is doing, looking at the monsoon forecasts and praying for rain.

The 2019 summer monsoon has reached the Indian mainland but the winds have stalled, partly due to the formation of a cyclone in the Arabian Sea. The Meteorological Department has forecast that this year’s monsoon rainfall will be around 96% of the long-period average over India as a whole.






The dry well in Pangri BK village into which water is poured by a tanker every alternate day. Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole

Search for water

Like Sakharam Langde, hundreds of thousands of farmers in Marathwada and Vidharbha are ploughing their fields in the hope of a good monsoon. That takes up a couple of hours a day. The rest of the time is spent looking for enough water so that the family and the domestic animals can survive.

The main drinking water well in Umarkheda has gone dry, as in every village in the region. Every alternate day, the district administration sends a tractor towing a 50,000-litre water tanker. That water is poured into the well and residents scramble to pull it out. Every household has two or three 20-litre vessels attached with ropes and residents – mostly women and girls – jostle at the lip of the well to pull out water. The faster you are, the better at pushing your neighbours, the more water you have.

“Within 20 minutes, that well goes totally dry again,” said resident Yashwant Langde.

Jyoti Bai, a frail woman in her early seventies, said, “I cannot do this. I have to depend on my two granddaughters. They are only eight and 10 years old. There is so much pushing and shoving that I’m always afraid they will fall into the well. I’ve heard of such accidents in other villages.”


The Maharashtra government has banned this practice of pouring water into wells. But the ban is flouted by its own employees, who say there is no other place where they can pour the water.


“We get such little water that we can have a bath only about once a week,” said Jyoti Bai. “Although you can see how hot it is. It is leading to skin diseases. Look at my granddaughters.” The stick-thin girls are all matted hair and scaly skin.'


Jyoti Bai of Umarkheda village (centre, in mauve sari). Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole





Their mother asked: “What is to be done? There has been no production in the farm. There is no money at home. So their father has gone to Pune to work as a labourer. There is no man in the house. And we don’t get enough water from the well for our two cows. So every day these girls walk over two kilometres around noon to a water point near the road, where they queue up for over an hour. Sometimes they get two vessels of water, sometimes they don’t. When they get it, they have to carry that on their heads in the afternoon heat. When they don’t get it, the cows go thirsty.”



Residents estimate that around 20% of the working-age men in each village have migrated. The farmers who have stayed back, like Gajanan Langde, use their bullock carts to fetch water. “Every day, I go two-three kilometres from the village in every direction, to see which water point has any water,” said Langde. “Sometimes, the whole day is gone by the time I fill up the vessels in the cart and come home.”


Urban malaise


The story is the same in every village and no better in the towns. Basavraj Kore, who used to teach Marathi at the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in Aurangabad, is proud of the kitchen garden in his Jalna home. Most of the plants survive, due to watering twice a day. “We have had to dig a very deep well and pump up the water,” said Kore. “I know it is bad for the water table, but there’s no option. You can’t depend on the municipality – they supply water once in three weeks.”


People in all the towns of Marathwada are in the same predicament. Those living in slums are worse off. In Aurangabad – the big city of the region – at least 60 slum children chased a water tanker sprinkling a freshly laid road with buckets to catch the water as it fell, according to local media reports. Hardly a drop reached the road.


Sanjay Malani, a journalist at the Marathi newspaper Prajapatra, thinks people have become inured to drought. “The droughts have gone on for so long that they have stopped expecting anything better. They have stopped expecting a decent life. They try to survive on whatever money they made from the last crop they managed to grow. When that runs out, the men migrate to the cities to work as labourers – this is a poor area and migration has always been high. Most of the high-rise buildings of Mumbai have been built by labourers from Marathwada. The women and children left behind spend all their time looking for water.”





Despite the late morning heat, villagers gather to collect water from a well on the road between Jalna and Beed. Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole
Despite the late morning heat, villagers gather to collect water from a well on the road between Jalna and Beed. Credit: Joydeep Gupta/ThirdPole

Farm insurance

With a 24-acre farm, Bhushan Rathore of Umarkheda is a big farmer by local standards. In the 2018 summer cropping season, he only got back just over half of the Rs 1,70,000 he spent on inputs for his cotton and soybean crops, as his crops were affected by the drought. So he claimed insurance last October. He is still waiting.

So are thousands of other Marathwada farmers, as they sit around their village squares and debate whether they should pay this year’s farm insurance premium, due in July for most of them. Opinion is evenly divided – half say it will be a waste of money they don’t have because less than 5% of the claims have been paid. The other half says not paying the premium will scupper their only chance of getting any compensation anytime.

Farm insurance premiums are paid personally by each farmer, but crop loss claims are handled collectively for a block or a district. Insurance companies go by government estimates of rainfall and crop loss and the rainfall is considered for the entire monsoon period, without any consideration of its distribution over time. Unsurprisingly, crop loss estimates of farmers and insurers are far apart.

Yuvraj Bayal of Pangri BK village in Jalna district says he paid a premium of Rs 2,500 plus a fee of Rs 200 last year and has got a compensation of Rs 3,350. He sees it as a bitter joke. Dhondi Sonaji Bayal of the same village paid a premium of Rs 3,000 and got a claim of Rs 3,000. All this is leading to a trust deficit that places the entire scheme in jeopardy.

Fodder stations

In some ways, cattle are faring better than humans in this drought. In Marathwada, the state government has set up fodder stations everywhere. The sugarcane that has been grown in low-lying areas over the last year does not have enough sugar content for the mills to buy them. So they are being sold for fodder and you can see wagonloads being transported on all the roads all the time.

At the large fodder stations off Nagar Road on the outskirts of district headquarters town Beed, Gholab Mawli and his family have effectively set up camp since the beginning of March, together with their 12 buffaloes. The Class 11 student says their 30-litre water tank is filled by the district authorities every day and they get enough fodder for their buffaloes. It’s all free of cost, and the family of dairy farmers is happy their buffaloes are still producing enough milk for them to sell in town every day.

The cattle are under makeshift shelters built by each family and each shelter is being guarded by at least one member of the family. In some cases, as with Gholab Mawli, the entire family had virtually moved into the shelter, commuting most days from their home 2 km away.

Gholab Mawli’s elder brother had two large jerrycans on each side of his motorcycle. He was setting out in search of water. “The buffaloes are getting water, but we are not,” he said. “I have to find water somewhere.”

This article first appeared on The Third Pole.