We came for Sonia Gandhi, we stumbled upon Bill Clinton. Brown but fired by the monsoon and standing in the middle of a muddy field in Madhya Pradesh, not very far from Saddam Hussein. Looking on were Vajpayee, Bal ‘Thakre’, even Winston Churchill. It may well be a George Bush nightmare but Umaria Collector Raghuveer Srivastava has a dream: by the end of 2004, he has promised his district a recharged water table and systems for soil conservation and irrigation. Since last year, Srivastava has been constructing 802 tanks across Umaria’s 683 villages as part of a Rs 25-crore ‘‘a village, a tank’’ scheme. With the good monsoon ensuring the success of the venture, attention has moved on to the other feature of the tanks. All bear names. Given that 802 were required, everyone who’s a someone— the Collector included—has been given the honour. So you have Clinton in village Chandaniya and Saddam in Chandwar. You also have tanks named after Jawaharlal Nehru, Digvijay Singh and brother Laxman rubbing shoulders with Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and ‘Thakre’. There’s even Voltaire near Osho and Arundhati ‘Rai’ with Gulzar, Taslima Nasreen and Shammi Kapoor. Since it’s all about taking the field, how can you forget sportsmen. It’s another matter though that you may have trouble telling Sen Warn from Monica Sailesh. Bringing up the rear are senior bureaucrats, who have got tanks of their own. Srivastava is clear in his mind: ‘‘These tanks have been named after outstanding personalities of the whole world, our country, our state and our district who have done so much for mankind.’’ While you may not agree, what you can’t challenge is that the tanks, constructed with funds drawn from drought-relief programmes, will not only help in irrigation but in recharging the water table. The administration estimates that approximately 16,000 cubic metres of water will percolate down every year, raising water levels in the district over 2 to 3 feet. Y R Pansre, living on the edge of the tank at Maliyaguda, confirms this: ‘‘The tank was built this February. So much water gathered that there was danger of the embankment giving way. We have just deepened the outlet.’’ Incidentally, he doesn’t know the name of his tank. Digvijay himself has commended the efforts of the local administration in underlining ‘‘the importance of each and every drop of water and means for conserving it.’’ While few of the tanks have given way, the failure rate is just about 3 per cent, enough to shut up critics. But there are some in these villages who complain that the tanks are no more than the latest administration fancy. Agasiya is the tribal sarpanch of Chandaniya, the village with the Clinton tank. A strong backer of the Digvijay government, she has no love lost for the tank which, she says, was constructed without consulting them and ‘‘is of no use.’’ As for Clinton, none in Chandaniya, barring BA student Imtiaz Ali, have heard of him. But then Imitiaz doesn’t know there is a tank in his backyard which has that name.
