People's Democracy

Disregarding The Drought

Jayati Ghosh

 IT is hard to think when we have last had a more irresponsible set of leaders running the central government. It is not just that they are busy destroying institutions, creating havoc in basic education through imposing problematic textbooks, and allowing the communalisation of society. It is also their complete lack of concern as regards the more pressing issues that directly affect most of the ordinary people of the country. Not only have they not put forward any positive agenda for economic development, they have been cynical in ignoring the immediate material problems faced by people.

Even for the public sector, there is no real discussion of genuine reform and improvement, or of addressing the problems of loss-making units. It seems that all this government can ever think of doing is disinvestments, that is selling off profitable public enterprises, involving a longer term fiscal loss to the state. There seem to be no other ideas, no plan, no initiative.

This is bad enough, but when there is an emergency and nothing gets done, then the situation is far more serious. What is more alarming at present is not only that nothing is being done about the current emergency, but the government does not even appear to think that doing anything is really necessary!

Take the effects of the recent drought, which is now recognised to be the worst that has affected the country since 1987, and probably even more intense. The monsoon that we have just had was highly deficient, with an estimated rainfall shortfall of 20 per cent in the aggregate. This will obviously mean that agricultural output will fall in the current year, and the rice output in particular is expected to be substantially less.

But the central government does not appear to be unduly concerned about this drought. This is mainly because currently the public sector is already sitting on vast excess stocks of foodgrain, and this might even be seen as an opportunity to get rid of some of these, at least a few million tonnes worth. Also, food prices are not likely to rise too much despite the lower output, because the overall supply position of foodgrain continues to be comfortable. And the projections of total economic growth have come down somewhat, but not all that much – GDP growth is now expected to be between 5 and 5.5 per cent.

So even the finance ministry, in its Mid-Year Review, appear to be reasonably complacent about the effects of the drought, suggesting that while it might lead to some slowdown and loss of output, this can be managed and is not in itself a very pressing problem.

All right, so overall economic growth will not apparently suffer too much, nor will food prices rise too much. But what of the agriculturalists who are affected? Why is their plight not a major concern for the government? Why is no action being taken to ensure that the worst affected areas receive large doses of drought relief and employment generation programmes to prevent destitution and starvation? How is it that there is no policy declared by the central government to address these problems immediately?

Consider this: the aggregate shortfall in rainfall was 20 per cent in the last monsoon. But the rainfall is never evenly spread, and so this must mean that some areas were highly deficient. In fact, even the very rough data available with the Meteorological Survey of India suggests that some areas were deficient by as much as 50 to 70 per cent. Obviously, the extent of distress in such areas must be extreme, and even critical in terms of possible starvation.

Any responsible government would immediately try to ensure that the people living in those areas are the first and most intensive beneficiaries of government assistance. But our central government has not even bothered to find out which those areas are! To this date, neither the Planning Commission nor the ministry of agriculture even have the list of worst-affected districts. So there is clearly no question of any systematic official attempts to ensure that foodgrain is transported to those areas as soon as possible, or that money is allocated for drought relief works specifically in those districts (or even blocks).

What does this mean? It means that in some parts of the country, already cultivators are facing huge shortfalls in their kharif output, and because prices are not likely to rise much, they will face massive declines in their money incomes. Specific areas are likely to experience massive distress, and small cultivators and labourers are probably already facing acute survival problems. Yet the official situation will be much as it was during colonial times, with a supreme disregard for these people and their most basic conditions of survival.

Even the mainstream media now seems already to have forgotten about the drought. For a brief while, when question about the drought were raised in parliament, there was much media coverage. But now this has apparently lost its “news value” so there is no coverage of the terrible fate that now lies in store for millions of small cultivators and poor peasants and workers in the country.

Amartya Sen had once famously argued that famine-related deaths would be less widely prevalent in India (than say in China) because of the presence of a free press that would bring this to public notice. Perhaps he reckoned without the nature of the mainstream media in India today, which is mostly so oriented towards the needs and interests of the elite that it has stopped bothering too much about issues such as how drought affects the lives of ordinary cultivators.

The tragedy is that, as the central government happily ignores this huge agrarian crisis, millions of people in rural India will face real problems that threaten their very survival.