Why’s water missing in the Poll discourse?

If there is one issue that certainly needs highlighting this election, it is water. If there is one which is not getting any attention, it is water.

If there is one issue that certainly needs highlighting this election, it is water. If there is one which is not getting any attention, it is water. Whether it’s Karnataka or faraway Arunachal Pradesh, southern Andhra Pradesh, northern Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand or Gujarat. With the northwest monsoon playing truant in some of these states, drought has become an ominously recurring phenomenon. The absence of long-term or even short-term mitigating policies means a near-perennial water crisis looms large over urban and rural India, affecting 52 per cent of the population.

Whereas urban Indian has the wherewithal to buy water, in rural India, heartwrenching stories are abound. Of middle and small farmers who once grew paddy, maize, mango, tomato, feeding the rest of the population, migrating to cities to work as security guards or wage labourers, even as their land lies cracked and fallow. Those who stay put, drill deep borewells or barter their lands to sustain their agriculture, depleting the water table further.

Irrigation projects remain tardy. Incomplete relief measures like loan waivers or crop insurance don’t bring water to the fields or for drinking. In some areas, people make do with potable water delivered to them through panchayats for two hours, once in two days. For the rest, it’s contaminated water extracted from dirty, drying ponds and wells. The health consequences have not even been factored in: Remember, 21 per cent of our diseases are water-related.

Global warming is a reality currently being lived in Indian villages. But no campaign speech talks about revivifying natural water systems through rainwater harvesting and such like. Our rivers are mostly running dry or polluted, thanks to uncontrolled, thoughtless ndustrialisation and overuse. Political parties are competing to prove whose heart bleeds more for the voters, but manifestoes only talk of poverty alleviation through direct cash transfers, but nothing that could still save India from the water wars of future.