Last week, while everyone in Gandhinagar was busy trying to plug two different kinds of leaks, nobody would say why the leaks occurred in the first place. First, the 20-feet-wide breach in the Narmada main canal on June 12. Embarrassingly for the government’s showcase Sardar Sarovar project, the water from the canal came gushing into villages in Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s home district of Mehsana. The repair work has begun on a war footing but in complete official silence. No heads have rolled yet, not even the mandatory public face savers.This is not the first breach in the main Narmada canal. The others, though not as big as the latest, were always couched in official denials. This one was too big to be denied, and mercifully, the state government, which has this paranoid fascination for “terror threat perception”, ruled out sabotage. That only leaves shoddy construction work and large scale corruption as the reasons for the leak. Chief Minister Narendra Modi rushed to the spot immediately after the canal breach, villagers and cattle were rescued, and a high-power committee was announced. But three days after the breach, nobody knows how it occurred and who are the inquiry committee members who are probing the leak. The other breach that officials and politicians have been trying to plug is a social one: the skewed sex ratio and poor female literacy levels. The entire entourage of the state’s ministers and bureaucrats have fanned out for the Kanya Kelavani programme, a state-wide drive to get girls to school.For the last eight years, the state government has been trying to boost female literacy levels. Now under Modi’s Kanya Kelavani Programme, the entire cabinet, the secretariat, and BJP MLAs and MPs camp in the districts to personally oversee the programme and ensure girls don’t drop out of school.On economic indicators, Gujarat’s performance has been exemplary but it can’t say the same about its social pointers. The 2001 Census puts Gujarat on 14th rank when it comes to the female literacy rate. At 58.60 per cent, it is just a tad higher than the national average of 54.16 per cent while the male literacy rates stands at 80.50 per cent. Its sex ratio is skewed too—921 women for every 1,000 men, while the national figure is 933. While there is a publicity overdrive on these state government programmes, officially, there is silence on the reasons for the social regression.There are other leaks too: a CAG report has indicted Modi’s pet irrigation scheme, the Sujalam Sufalam project, with questions being raised about its technical feasibility.
