Memories of another scorching summer

Replying to a special discussion on the drought conditions in Gujarat, feared to be the worst in the century, the Revenue Minister, Mr Harisinh Mahida, said the relief works in new areas would be opened without a survey of the crop. Even the condition that the rainfall in an area should be less than 125 mm for starting relief works has been waived this time.

The minister also appealed to the people of Gujarat and voluntary organisations to raise their resources to help the state in facing the challenge of nature. He said that even with all its resources at its disposal, the Government alone could not accomplish this Herculean task, especially when this is the third successive year of the scarcity…

JAIPUR, August 31, 1987: The Prime Minister, Mr Rajiv Gandhi, on Monday called upon his party workers to “unitedly and selflessly” fight the challenge posed by drought without caring for “controversies” which had arisen of late.

Addressing a meeting of senior party functionaries at the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress(I) Committee office here, Mr Gandhi asked the workers to do their job, “without seeking any publicity”…

The Prime Minister pointed out that since drought was countrywide this year it might not be possible to give the same help to the state as earlier. He noted that Rajasthan and Gujarat were facing the most severe famine.

Mr Gandhi said the Centre had changed certain norms in providing aid to famine-affected states. Rajasthan, he added, would receive more aid for drinking water even though it did not have dense population like many other states….
— News reports from `The Indian Express’, August 1987

IT is now clear that in the current year India faces a severe and widespread drought comparable to, if not worse than, the one in the mid-sixties….

The ramification of the drought on the economy are difficult to quantify at this stage but can be foreseen in terms of their directional impact. The import bill will sharply increase on account of the immediately necessary imports of edible oil, pulses and diesel oil and also because of foodgrain imports which will be required to replenish the stocks…

The decline in food availability is, however, only one aspect of the drought. The other is the damage that it will inflict on millions of poor households that depend on the rural economy for their livelihood and earnings. The poorest among them include small and marginal farmers, landless agricultural labourers, craftsmen and other non-agricultural works and casual workers of different sorts. What the drought will do is to rob them of incomes that they normally derive from their assets, such as land and cattle, or from their labour power which is the only source of earning available to asset-less rural workers. Agricultural labourers are likely to be the worst hit. They will suffer a sharp decline in their earnings because of lesser employment and depressed wages. This, along with an increase in foodgrain prices, will have a disastrous effect on their real incomes….

Given the well-known problems with the PDS and works programmes, a far more effective approach to relieve distress would be to distribute grain directly to the target group of landless rural labour and marginal farmers in the affected areas. The advantages in direct distribution of grain will be manifold. By deploying the entire cost of Rs 20 per manday on grain, the benefit to recipients will be 67 per cent more than in conventional works where only Rs 12 is the wage content. In other words, the coverage of beneficiaries could be increased, for a given budgetary allocation, by as much as two-thirds….
— Excerpted from `Drought relief: put people first’, by S.Guhan; September 1, 1987