2016 was a difficult year. I don’t know how 2017 will turn out. The Cauvery crisis was normal. Rain has been the same for a few years. People who have money are not affected by demonetisation. Only the poor suffer
2016 was a difficult year. I don’t know how 2017 will turn out. The Cauvery crisis was normal. Rain has been the same for a few years. People who have money are not affected by demonetisation. Only the poor suffer

In Karnataka's Srirangapatna, 'Na paisa, na paani'

On the bus to Srirangapatna, it didn’t take long for me to discover what’s the issue uppermost in people’s minds.

On the bus to Srirangapatna, it didn’t take long for me to discover what’s the issue uppermost in people’s minds. My conversation with the passenger next to me, an auditor, was distracted by an angry exchange between the conductor and a woman. It was the Rs 2,000 argument. She had given him the pink note and he didn’t have change.

“You ought to have change. If not you, who will have it?” she said. “I am not from the bank!” he said. In the first days of demonetisation, such exchanges had been sweet and full of fellow feeling because everyone was in the same boat. But now after the post Dec 30 period, tempers were beginning to bubble.

The auditor B M Sudhakar proved to be demonetisation positive. He said he helped out with an NGO called Prathibe in Mysuru. They make substantial “contributions” in the form of houses and livestock for tribal people near Gundlupet. I got the drift of things when he said, a bit after the conductor’s row, “If we consider the nation as a whole, some brave decisions have been taken by the government too.”

The exchange over change had now provided the context for our conversation and Sudhakar supplied me his view. He said the corrupt are being exposed, and soon when the Rs 2,000 notes too will cease to be valid currency, “things will only improve in the coming days”. The prices are rising though. “We have to bear it,” he said. On the bridge to Srirangapatna, it was immediately apparent to me that the town would be worried about something equally elemental as money, water — or both — which is only natural since the town is almost completely enveloped by the Kaveri as it flows by on both its northern and southern flanks. 

From the window of the bus I could see that the riverbed was covered with vegetation. The river itself has shrunk to a stream and its pollution was evident. Long before it reaches the Thanjavur delta, the Kaveri is an exhausted river, suckled dry by Bengaluru and Mysuru and a score more towns, reservoirs and farms, leaving just the dregs to fight over.

In the historic town, conversations about the new year’s new hopes were difficult to get going and tended to end with the regulation shrug of the shoulder. I stopped at a cobbler named Shivu on Irwin Road to have my shoe mended and here’s how in went. “2016 was a difficult year. I don’t know how 2017 will turn out,” he said. The Cauvery crisis?

“Normal.” Rains? “Has been the same for a few years.” Demonetisation? “People who have money are not affected by anything. Only the poor who suffer.” It wasn’t until I got back on a bus to Chikkamagaluru that I met someone to whom something new had happened. And it was a happy story. The boy was a second year B Com student from Belur, Sachin T D. He was travelling back after taking acting classes in Hassan.

He beamed when I asked how the past year had turned out. He had just landed a role in a Kannada TV serial, Varasdara. “But the year hasn’t been all good for my family as a whole,” he qualified. His father, who owns a five-acre coffee and pepper plantation was staring at losses because the Malnad region had poor rains. “It did not rain at all,” Sachin said.

“Hopefully next year the rains will be better and I will land a role in the movies,” he added. The ravages of drought were clearly in evidence on the second day of my journey. As the bus hurtled from Shivamogga towards Harihar in Davanagere district, the landscape was a scene of yellowing paddy — save the banks of the Bhadra and some rare areca nut plantations. A land that cultivated two cycles of paddy every year was down to just one. I met a young man named Vinay who runs a small eatery in a village called Gondi Chatnahalli in Shivamogga district.

“Ille malnadalli kaleda thinglalli eradu borewell kett hodvu” (in our village, two borewells failed in the past month),” he said. All the fields around his eatery are fallow. “We have had one drought after another. Labourers will not be able to find work until the monsoon.”

All conversations I had on buses throughout the countryside beyond Bengaluru were down to money and water and the stories people told me about themselves were small personal joys such as that budding actor on the bus to Shivamogga who landed a role in a serial. Demonetisation’s privations were common enough, always leavened with the notion that this was deserved comeuppance for the rich and that these difficulties were just the penance for something good in the new year. Water was the more serious consideration.
 
Travelling to Lingasugur in Raichur district, I met Shankar, the panchayat development officer of a gram panchayat. By now there was a marked difference in the Kannada we spoke. Money was not ‘hana’ here, but ‘rokka’. He pointed to the fields by the road side and said farmers were reduced to falling back upon the moisture contained in the winter mist to cultivate crops such as tur dal.

It was not until I get a view of the Krishna and the Bheema rivers in the north that the water narrative changed a bit. Along the banks of the Krishna, farmers were making the most of a river that is in a better condition than they have seen in the past few years — thanks to heavy showers in Maharashtra in the last monsoon. But wait. I stopped to ask Suresh Hiremath, an agent of a pygmy deposit scheme in Jevargi, “How was 2016?” “One of the worst I have had,” he told me.

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