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 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 grueling 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 make daily ends meet for families. It’s been hard all these years. This year too, there seems to be no respite.
Many have been forced to migrate to other parts of Rajasthan and north Gujarat. Last year, the district administration in Bikaner sanctioned 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 million dollar 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 thousands in the Indira Gandhi Nehar Project [IGNP], Stage I, at Birdhwal Head and other areas of Ganganagar district. They have been fairly voluble and organized about their defiance and demands for their ‘rights’ in the IGNP, the Ganga and the Bhakra systems. There have been rallies, mahasabhas, demonstrations, gheraos, state-level conventions demanding more water and electricity. Most farmers participating are middle to big peasants, backed by a number of traders’ associations, who have favoured agriculture on the lines of the green revolution model in Punjab, which were relatively more sensitive to water use.
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 area infamous for water-logging. The farmers there do not want to be left behind in this race for the 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 the 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 is worse. Not only has there been acute water scarcity, the sad plight of the settlers has been worsened by land resource issues. A reconnaissance survey carried out by the UN agency FAO, way back in the 1960s, had indicated that more than 40 per cent of the land was unfit 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 ‘peasant’s instinct to colonise the land’ has been abused by the state in these parts.
Since the severe drought cycle of 1999-2000, a process of de-peasantisation has been happening with alarming 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 of¬¬f. The demands at the farmer agitations, resonate with these horrid daily realities. Apart from demands of their share of water, they have been demanding concessions regarding deferring the payment of installments of their agricultural land as well. In these forsaken canal command areas, the conflicts over water occur daily, at every point of distribution, down to the tailend 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 of 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, farmers have been relegated to a subservient role—to a recipe for privatization 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 that farmers have been doomed to. For the majority of farmers and settlers, 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.