High and dry Baramati

In one of Maharashtra’s seats, villagers have been waiting for water for 50 years. Ajit Pawar and family have been winning it for almost as long.

Ajit Pawar doesn’t believe Baramati, the family pocketborough, has a water problem. Even if it does, the Maharashtra deputy chief minister doesn’t want to hear Baramati complain about it. A year ago, he asked people if they wanted him to urinate into a dam to get them more water. More recently, Pawar is alleged to have hushed up a man protesting about the problem saying they should vote for his cousin Supriya Sule or he would cut off the village’s water supply.

No one in Masalwadi village, where Pawar is said to have made the threat, is willing to talk any more. However, the area around speaks for itself. While the last four decades have seen numerous sugar factories, milk cooperatives and farmers’ federations come up in Baramati, there’s no trace of this prosperity as one travels north within the taluka. The lush green fields of sugarcane and vegetables soon give way to long, dry stretches.

“There are around 20 villages in this area which are waiting for water for 50 years. Multiple schemes were announced but remained on paper. The latest, Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme, was approved in 1992. However, in the last 18 years, it has not generated even a bucket of water,” says Navnath Jagadale of Tardoli village, 5 km from Masalwadi.

Farmers here can’t grow multiple crops or cash crops such as sugarcane and vegetables, which their counterparts in some villages of the taluka do.

“All we can grow are onion, jowar, soyabean and bajra. Only 5 per cent of the farming in our area is under irrigation,” says Jagdale, who fasted for nine days in November 2013 seeking completion of the Purandar water scheme.

He says people prefer to work as labourers in the irrigated parts than till their own land. “This is happening in the most prosperous taluka in Maharashtra which is marketed as a model of rural development,” Jagdale chuckles.
Kavila Govekar of Tardoli village says even getting drinking water or taking a bath is a problem. “If the monsoon is good, we get drinking water for at least four-six months. But towards the end of winter and the entire summer, we have to struggle for every drop.”

Says a Masalwadi villager, “Of 22 villages, only five-six have piped drinking water supply, even if irregular. The rest are entirely dependent on wells and borewells.”

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While one of the reasons for the problem is the reluctance of Purandar tehsil in Pune district to share the waters of Mula-Mutha river with Baramati, villagers blame it on the lack of political will.

Despite being in power at the Centre and in the state for multiple terms, the Pawars have failed to ensure budgetary allocation for the scheme. The Baramati constituency is represented in the Lok Sabha by Sule and in the Assembly by Pawar.

Bhausaheb Kare, chairman of the public works department of the Pune Zilla Parishad and a senior NCP leader from Baramati, however, says the Purandar lift irrigation project will be ready in about five months. “Three villages in Purandar taluka had stalled the work as they didn’t want to share their water with Baramati. This issue has been resolved after local leaders from Baramati engaged with them. The state government allotted Rs 60 crore for the project this February,” he says.

Ironically, the one good news this year has been the hailstorms that struck Maharashtra in March 2014. They are estimated to have resulted in crop losses amounting to Rs 10,000 crore. A month down the line, however, Baramati villagers feel the hailstorms were a blessing in disguise.

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Sanjay Gonde belongs to Medad village, one of the worst affected by the hailstorms, 15 km from Baramati town. “Our village belongs to the drought-prone area of western Maharashtra. Due to the hailstorms, the water level in wells and borewells has remained high. We are using it for drinking and irrigation,” says the farmer.

Villagers admit that there is growing anger as the Purandar irrigation scheme is seen as their last hope. They are not surprised that this erupted into the alleged exchange with Pawar in Masalwadi on April 16, with a youth seeking to know why the pipeline to his village hadn’t materialised. As the matter blew up into a controversy, villagers denied the episode.

“There have been multiple protests the past year. These were mostly apolitical protests in which even NCP workers participated. The region has been blindly voting for the Pawars for half a century now, but even the most basic needs have not been met,” says Jagdale.

“Poverty here is rampant. And there’s no hope of coming out of it as long as there’s no water,” he adds.