The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Mind of the farmer
Change needs confidence building

Punjab has demanded Rs 7,900 crore for diversification of agriculture from the Centre. The Central government, which is giving Rs 224 crore for the purpose this financial year, has demanded a detailed plan on how the state would use the money. Amidst this battle over how much money is needed and how much can be afforded, focus is diverted from the core requirement, i.e., growing crops other than paddy, essentially, and also some diversification from wheat. The ‘new’ crops proposed, such as maize, are actually what the states’ farmers had traditionally grown for ages before the Green Revolution that is rendering the state dry today came about. There is a lot that can be done without spending much money.

There are initiatives such as new varieties of basmati that require less water — saving which is a major goal of diversification — and direct sowing of common paddy that have failed to catch on because the states’ farmers are either not aware enough of the alternatives, don’t have the required implements, or are simply not confident. The last one is an emotional factor, but a very real deterrent in changing the course of agriculture. The world over, farmers are a conservative lot. Before changing they want absolute surety, and better still, demonstration. All these are issues that can be addressed by the state government with the existing wherewithal.

Use the agricultural extension services to educate farmers. Get some of the rich farmers — who can afford to take risks — to demonstrate success of alternative crops. Make the required seeds and implements available easily. All this will have to be done in ‘mission mode’, and not by the bureaucratic approach of making plans and proposals, which can keep happening in their own sweet time. Diversification need not wait for anything. The biggest disincentive for quitting paddy — free electricity — continues. If the government is determined to subsidise irrigation, it may charge only a very small amount for the power, but it must do so, and do it with metered supply. A farmer has to have an immediate reason to save water. Diversification is as much a game of the mind as money.

Iran gets new President
Can he come up to people’s expectations?

THE victory of Hassan Rowhani in the just-concluded presidential election in Iran provides clear hints that most Iranians do not favour extremist policies or rigidity on any issue. It is not without reason that the Iranian voters have preferred Rowhani. They have suffered a lot because of the hardliner approach of the outgoing President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran today faces international isolation of the worst kind. Its oil and gas exports have declined considerably because of the payment problem following the sanctions imposed by the UN, the US and the European Union. The result is that the Iranian economy is virtually gasping for breath. That the Iranians want an end to the uncompromising attitude of its top leadership can also be seen in the rejection of Saeed Jalili, a presidential candidate well known for his closeness to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has always stood for a dogmatic approach to deal with any issue.

But will Rowhani be able to bring about a drastic change in Iran’s foreign policy when it comes to removing the international community’s suspicions about its controversial nuclear programme and Tehran’s involvement in the developments in West Asia? No Iranian President can go beyond the limit permitted by Ayatollah Khamenei. Any policy change that Rowhani may try to introduce will have to be approved by the Iranian supreme leader.

Yet there are ways in which the new President can cause a break from the past eight years’ policies when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held this highest office in that country. He can set in a process of gradual change instead of going in for a policy overhaul. Rowhani clearly understands the policy formation process as he has been associated with Iran’s National Security Council for as long as 16 years. He can come up to the expectations of the Iranians as well as the world community if he learns lessons from how Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani succeeded in extricating Iran from the eight-year-long war with Iraq when he was appointed the commander of the army. His success on the war front led to his election as Iranian President at that time.

Thought for the Day

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.—H. G. Wells

ARTICLE

BJP’s Modi card
It does not fit in with the idea of India
by Kuldip Nayar

Politics in India may not be the same again. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has charged the agenda. It has introduced pure communalism to the soft Hindutava that prevailed so far. By appointing hardliner Narendra Modi, Gujarat Chief Minister, the panel chief for the 2014 Parliament election, the party has dropped every bit of ambiguity over secularism. It is stark Hinduism for all to see.

Apparently, the old leadership resisted the decision. Tall L.K.Advani had even submitted his resignation from all the posts he held in the party. Yet the irresponsible younger cadre was in no mood to accommodate the sober point of view. For them, a sharper communal politics was the minimum. Advani had reportedly warned behind the walls that Modi was not a proper person for India’s leadership.

The atmosphere may become more bitter when the BJP propagates “Hindu rashtriyata” openly. True, the concept goes against the very grain of the Constitution which wanted the country to be a secular democratic republic. But the BJP has found no benefit from it. In the future, the very word “secularism”, will come under different interpretations. Parties, however parochial in outlook, will claim to be secular.

Therefore, Modi’s acceptance speech was understandably vehement against the Congress, the largest political party which has come to be associated with secularism. He wants the party to disappear from the scene so that there is no confusion between the BJP, a Hindu outfit, and the Congress, with secular credentials.

This may or may not happen but the BJP has embarked upon the task of wiping the slate clean with no mention of secularism whatsoever. Since Independence, even long before it, the freedom struggle was based on the idea of an independent India which would know no difference on the basis of community or caste.

The leaders immersed in that struggle agreed to India’s partition but not to the thesis that the religion could be mixed with politics. Secularism is thus the cornerstone of the structure that India has tried to raise after Partition. It has not been an ideal effort. Yet it has kept the country together, with no recurring example of communal divide.

In the process, the nation has also come to recognise the distance between communal forces and secular elements. It has resulted in a healthy development: secular political parties have generally kept away from the BJP to stall its installation at the Centre. The induction of Modi may not defeat the process. But it will definitely confuse the Hindus who, leave some apart, are animated with cosmopolitan thoughts. They stopped the BJP winning in the last two parliamentary elections because when the time for casting votes came, they put their weight behind the liberal forces which has kept the country more or less midway neither left or right. The danger of its going right has increased now.

The RSS, which has initiated and supported Modi, sees in him someone nearer to their ideology of Hindutava and anti-Muslimness. Real Modi was, however, exposed when he blessed the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat a decade ago. Not a word of regret even after years only underlines his anti-Muslim thinking. How can India have a person like him as the Prime Minister?

The repercussions of such a person at the helm of the BJP, not possessing even a semblance of liberalism, can be dangerous. Obsessed with driving a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, he can vitiate the young mind. Liberalism or idealism already receding to the background, bigotism and extremism will go to allocate what is left of the composite culture.

When I was India’s High Commissioner at London, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked me the secret of India staying together for centuries. I told her that we did not believe that the country was divided into black and white. We believed that there was a vast grey area. We went on expanding that area. That was our secularism. The idea kept the nation together. She was reportedly impressed by my explanation and told this to Soviet President Gorbachev. He sent a delegation to India to study the strength of grey area, secularism.

Modi will make black further bleak and shut every opening for the grey area to expand. In the last few decades, the BJP has purveyed the impression that it is looking for a space that will give it an image of being right of Right, that of pro-Hindu but not of an extremist kind. Modi will stop such an ideology developing. It will be saffron all the way. The BJP has foolishly come to realise that it would have to sharpen the difference with the Muslims to look different. It believes that if there is any time to play the Hindu card, it is now. This is a wrong thinking, leaving no space for even small gestures for conciliation. Advani’s presence evokes hope.

The greatest benefit of Modi’s importance will be to the Congress. Not that it is intrinsically secular but it has the reputation of being so. The Muslim electorate, nearly 15 per cent, will move towards the Congress and adversely affect large parties like Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party, which has a large Muslim following in UP. The party’s image is also secular. The Congress will gain because the next election is not that of state assembly but of Parliament. Muslims know the importance. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the BJP’s allies, may still part company with the party.

The real loss is that of the Indian nation. At a time when it looks that the various elements have found their identity within the country, Modi’s image of parochialism comes in the open. The idea of India will be jeopardised. It is a pity that the country will be unsettling when it is settling down to an ideology which may not be purely secular but does not disturb the people of different faiths to live a life of their own in their own way.

MIDDLE

‘Arrived safely. Letter follows’
By Roopinder Singh

MY father never opened a telegram, not if he could help it. A deeply ingrained attitude, developed and nurtured in the early decades spent in his village, Mithewal, had convinced Giani Gurdit Singh that telegrams were harbingers of bad news.
The fact that he had a fair share of telegrams coming his way, and most of them were positive messages, did little to assuage his bias against the magic of “Morse”. Some were important, some not, but hesitation could always be seen in the way my father handled them. As such, we often would intercept them and convey the contents so that he would not have to open them. He never asked for it, but then he never had to.

As a family, we had to deal with a deluge that we were happy to contend with — many congratulatory messages from all over — when Mrs Inderjit Kaur, my mother, was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Punjabi University, Patiala. I have been going through them these days as I work on a Festschrift that we hope to finish by her 90th birthday, which is coming soon. A highly-organised person, she has kept them in files, tagged and annotated. Some of the names belong to notables of the past, most are senders who she felt were notable in her life — her family, students and colleagues.

As I read them, I marvel at how much meaning and emotion the staccato sentences conveyed. Telegraphs, which will no longer be a part of our life, had urgency and a certain definiteness about them. For the families of soldiers, these were all too often harbingers of bad news, cancelled leave or worse. For newspaper men, these were the very soul of communication. For ordinary people, they brought in news from faraway lands. They were the fastest way to get messages across.

So convinced was I of the effectiveness and speed of the telegraph system that on my maiden trip to London in the mid-1980s, I sent a telegram to my host, indicating the date and time of the arrival of my flight. Landing at Heathrow airport, I was rather disconcerted to find that no one was there to receive me. I took some change from an impeccably turned young woman behind a counter and tried to call my friend using a nearby pay phone. I would get a recorded message and the call would just not go through. My desperation was evident by the time I went to the counter to get some change for the third time. “Bhaaji, tusi bare pareshan lagde ho,” commented the girl in chaste Punjabi. Even as I came to terms with her Western attire and rustic Punjabi, I poured out my tale of woe to her.

“Show me the number,” she said. I did and found out that I had been dialling the area code all the time, which is why I had been getting the wrong message. On her advice, I went to the payphone and retrieved a handful of coins that I had deposited earlier, which had collected in a receptacle. I dialled again, sans the area code, and reached an answering machine, but no friend at the other end of the phone.

By now I was a little more confident and took the tube to my friends’ house, which I found locked. On this nice and sunny day, I decided to take a nap near the entrance, only to be woken up by a pair of Bobbies who wanted to know what I was doing there. They checked my papers and directed me to wait for my friend at a nearby coffee shop.

Eventually my friend showed up and I was made more than welcome. I called home instead of sending the usual “Arrived safely. Letter follows” telegram. Two days later, I answered the door and was given a telegram...one that I had sent intimating my friend about my arrival details! “My God, telegrams are more efficient and prompt in India,” I said, and thanked my stars that I had called home to confirm my arrival in London, for once agreeing with my father’s bias against this medium of communication.

OPED-Environment

Managing groundwater in rural India
Since groundwater development is demand driven, it can be geared up through appropriate agricultural, credit, subsidy and energy support policies along with the creation of suitable markets, first and foremost, for small and marginal farming communities
Abhilaksh Likhi

India's rapidly industrialising economy and urbanising society pose a daunting challenge towards augmenting the limited supply of water resources. No wonder that conflicts over competing uses and users of water, especially in rural areas, are growing by the day. Agriculture that uses 80 per cent of the water resources with low efficiency is a case in point. The falling water table due to deep drilling and groundwater contamination through a discharge of untreated effluents is a serious problem.

Therefore, in the context of the climate change effects that continue to upset weather patterns, efficient underground water management is extremely critical for 200 million hectares of rain-fed areas. This, in fact, constitutes 62 per cent of the geographical area of the country with the largest concentration of rural poverty spanning several agro-ecological regions.

The continuous migration of villagers to cities imposes tremendous pressure on water supply for drinking and other purposes. Groundwater contamination through a discharge of untreated effluents is a serious problem.

Since groundwater, as a common pool resource, also accounts for nearly two-thirds of India's irrigation water needs, there is a dire need for a participatory approach to make its sustainable management more effective. It is interesting to highlight that while groundwater resources are perceived as a part of specific geographic and administrative formations -- watersheds, landscapes, river basins, villages, blocks, districts and states, they are seldom placed in context of aquifers -- rock formations that are capable of storing and transmitting the same.

An aquifer mapping approach actually can lead to a more realistic assessment of groundwater storage and transmission characteristics to build 'bottom-up' capacities of local planners. With regulatory participation at the level of rural communities through local bodies i.e. Panchayati Raj Institutions(PRIs) and grassroots civil society organisations, various factors such as drilling depth, distance between wells and the need for change in cropping patterns can determine the need for three key interventions: power/electricity rationing, allowance for degree of area wise exploitation and creation of durable water harvesting structures through flagship programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Gujarat model: separate power for tubewells

A successful example of the above strategy is the initiative taken by the Government of Gujarat. The latter has invested US$ 250 million in separation of power supply for tubewells used for agriculture from other rural non-farm connections (supply to school, hospitals etc) and imposed an eight-hour a day power ration which is of high quality. This has been converged through PRIs with an intensive block-wise aquifer mapping exercise and a massive water harvesting structure renovation campaign under MGNREGA.

Such convergence has led to outcomes like halving of the power subsidy, stabilisation of groundwater resources and improved power supply in the rural economy. Similarly, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has supported the Government of Andhra Pradesh through a PRI-driven rural development programme that involves farmers in hydrological data generation and decision-making in crop water budgeting.

In fact, another critical challenge is to integrate information on the area-wise rate of extraction of groundwater within the total ecological and livelihood security of the rural space. Government initiatives towards aquifer mapping in this regard have been complemented through public-private partnerships, by civil society organisation innovations.

The Barefoot College, Tilonia (Rajasthan) runs the programme 'Jal Chitra' (Water Map) that aims at estimating the cost of developing water sources through rain water harvesting structures or recharging of wells by community assessment of the gap between the reliable availability and requirement of water. In a dozen villages of Rajasthan, the Barefoot College backed information technology software supports database of optimal irrigation water required, depending upon crops planted and amount of rainfall received. More importantly, motivated local facilitators from the Barefoot College also continually involve the rural community in sharing as to how much of its annual water need is being met from underground water and the approximate amount of groundwater recharging that is taking place.

A third challenge is the activation of Water Users Associations (WUAs) at the Gram Panchayat level in the village that would participate in the MGNREGA renovation plan of water harvesting structures, pisiculture, tree planting and command area development works. This should also include maintenance and management, including tail-end water distribution across uses and users, through the revenues earned by charging for its services and building a corpus over time for sustained existence.

Gap between potential created & potential utilised

In this context, the Dhan Foundation, Tamil Naidu, has done exemplary grassroots work in identifying the need for desilting of water tanks and removal of encroachments at the inlet, which over the years reduced the storage capacity of these tanks and led to their abandonment. The Foundation's efforts have led to outcomes such as reduction in excess pumping that had lowered the water table year after year because of reduced recharging, in turn, of the aquifer.

In this context, a related missing link in the management of medium and large irrigation projects is the gap between the potential created and potential utilised that suffers often from faulty project designs, poor lining of canals and shoddy maintenance of distribution channels, essentially due to lack of participatory management.

Despite the above being addressed through Centrally sponsored programmes such as the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), what is required is intensive capacity building of farming communities in demand side articulation rather than singular focus on the supply side mechanisms of O&M (operation and management) by the line departments. The impact assessment study of ten irrigation projects in different states conducted by the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, confirms the missing link in grassroots management both of catchment and command areas of the irrigation projects.

Shift to demand-driven participatory approach

In the ultimate analysis it has to be a paradigm shift away from a narrow engineering construction approach to a demand-driven participatory approach towards groundwater management. This, in fact, attains more criticality in the context of the anticipated migration of population from the rural to urban areas with the numbers in urban areas rising to 600 million in 2030, leading to tremendous pressure on water supply for drinking and other purposes. In fact, along the rural- urban continuum, medium-sized towns will face a greater squeeze on availability of water resources requiring more focus on regulation of use for industrial and construction purposes.

Needless to state that since groundwater development is demand driven, it can be geared up through appropriate agricultural, credit, subsidy and energy support policies along with the creation of suitable markets, first and foremost, for small and marginal farming communities in rural areas.

It is high time that regulatory national organisations in India such as the National Ground Water Board ensured more decentralised and iterative mechanisms to coordinate among relevant government ministries like drinking water, rural development, agriculture, environment and forests. At the same time, the programme implementation for participatory aquifer mapping at the grassroots has to be incentivised through PRIs, especially at the Gram Panchayat level. It is at this last mile and cutting edge point that dovetailing of programmes like MGNREGA and the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) with civil society collaboration will make participatory underground water management truly sustainable.

The writer is an IAS officer and currently a Senior Fellow at South Asia Studies, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC. The views expressed are personal

Key issues

* Agriculture uses 80 per cent of water resources with low efficiency

* Efficient underground water management is extremely critical for 200 million hectares of rain-fed areas

* Groundwater, as a common pool resource, accounts for nearly two-thirds of India's irrigation water needs

* Aquifer mapping approach actually can lead to a more realistic assessment of groundwater storage and transmission characteristics

* Community participation can determine the need for three key interventions: power/electricity rationing, allowance for degree of area-wise exploitation and creation of durable water harvesting structures

* There is need to integrate information on the area-wise rate of extraction of groundwater within the total ecological and livelihood security of the rural space

* A critical challenge is the activation of Water Users Associations (WUAs) at the Gram Panchayat level

* The dovetailing of programmes like MGNREGA and the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) with civil society collaboration will make participatory underground water management truly sustainable

Gujarat has invested US$ 250 million in the separation of power supply for tubewells used for agriculture from other rural non-farm connections (supply to school, hospitals etc) and imposed an eight-hour a day power ration which is of high quality. This has led to outcomes like the halving of the power subsidy, stabilisation of groundwater resources and improved power supply in the rural economy