Calcutta Notebook
B J

Amad rush to over-exploit the natural resources of the country is unfolding with agonizing tales of disaster. Forests are being cut to extract coal and minerals. The barren lands are not being rehabilitated. Chemical fertilizers are being used profusely such that the bacteria in the topsoil are dying and the long term productivity of land is declining. Excessive and indiscriminate use of antibiotic drugs is creating resistance in TB and other diseases. These are becoming untreatable except by expensive hospitalization. Hydropower projects are killing the fishes which help maintain quality of river water. There is an effort in all spheres to increase consumption at present irrespective of whether it kills the resources permanently. People are cutting the mango tree for fuel wood instead of eating its fruit. One glaring example of such overexploitation is that of ground water. Rapid depletion of ground water is taking place across the country. There is need to implement creative policies to prevent this.

Main problem is that price of water is treated as nil. The user only has to pay for the expenses incurred in extracting it from the ground or the river. No charge is to be paid for the water itself. This leads to excess use of water especially by the farmers who consume most of the water available in the country. In the year 2000, 89 percent of water was being used by farmers, 6 percent by industries and 5 percent by domestic users. Any effort to reduce the use of water would therefore have to necessarily focus on reducing water use in agriculture.

Farmers grow water-intensive crops like chilies and grapes because water is cheap. Higher price of water will make cultivation of these crops difficult and encourage farmers to grow other crops that require less water like mustard, groundnuts and bajra. This will strengthen food security as well. After all, no country starved because fewer grapes were cultivated!

The correct solution is to increase the price of water so industrialists and farmers use less of the same.

One proposed solution is to introduce licensing for digging of new tube wells. This will not solve the problem, though. Competitive deepening of tube wells will continue. Say there are two farmers, Ram and Shyam, who both have tube wells that are 300 feet deep. Now, Ram wants to increase irrigation and deepens his tube well to 400 feet. He draws more groundwater and Shyam's tube well runs dry. Then Shyam deepens his tube well to 500 feet. Now Ram's tube well runs dry. Both compete with each other to mutual harm. The total water available remains almost the same. But both spend more money to extract the same water from greater depths.

The objective of licensing is laudable. However, if the authority to grant licenses is given to the collector it will become yet another route to corruption. The collector himself will rarely have the time to go into the merits of each case. The patwari and kanungo will then start selling the licenses for a premium. They can also start extorting money from hapless farmers by merely threatening to close down their wells.

Such licensing will also not prevent a further fall in the water table because the existing borewells can be deepened. There is no provision of restriction on continued over-extraction by existing borewells. The basic objective of conserving water resources would thus be defeated.

A further problem is that of equity. The borewells that have already been sunk may often belong to the larger landlords. In the past they alone had the money to do so. The poorer people have lately begun to raise their heads. These poorer latecomers will be denied the opportunity to put up new borewells under the licensing arrangement. The richer early birds will continue to merrily extract groundwater while the poor will be deprived of their share in the earth's resources in the name of scarcity of ground water. Those who created the scarcity by over-exploitation would continue to over-exploit and those who have been deprived of their share in the past will continue to be deprived. The Bill will ensure that the poor will remain poor forever.

Let the government fix a maximum depth of a borewell that can be sunk in an area. It should be mandatory for the government to announce this permissible depth for each district, block or cluster as the case may be. All borewells deeper than this permissible depth should be required to fill up their wells to the permissible depth within a specified time. This will stop the extraction of groundwater below the permissible depth. Only the water that is freshly recharged within this layer of the earth can be extracted.

Once the government has specified the maximum permissible depth, then everyone is free to sink a new borewell upto that depth. No license be required. The patwari can thereafter not extort money from the farmers. The poor latecomers are also saved.

Farmers can be given incentives to establish water recharging structures. The Tennessee Valley Authority faced a problem of too much silt flowing into the reservoir. The Government made it compulsory for the farmers to make bunds of a particular height along their fields. As a result most silt got trapped in the fields and silt flowing into the reservoir was reduced. Indian farmers can also make bunds along the borders of their fields and ensure that rain water does not flow out. This will lead to more water percolating into the ground and the groundwater table will rise. Similar creative policies must be applied in all spheres of economic activity.

Resources must be harnessed in a way that future generations can also live.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 24, Dec 23-29, 2012

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