The story is forgotten. At a time when much of India was faced with food shortage, the then PM Lal Bahadur Shastri had urged the nation to fast on Mondays. The year was 1965. It was a year of drought and India was largely dependent on food imports.
It wasn’t as if everyone in the country at that time was sleeping hungry. But Shastri’s call for fasting on Mondays was primarily an expression of solidarity with the hungry millions. I don’t think the food saved was enough to even feed a fraction of the hungry population, but the underlying message was loud and clear—the nation cared for its people and was willing to sacrifice its one day food so that it could be shared with those who were living in hunger.
Fifty years later, it actually required a directive from the Bombay High Court to shift 13 IPL cricket matches from drought-hit Maharashtra for the “larger cause of the people”. The high court certainly knew that the water saved from maintaining cricket pitches would not even meet the daily requirement of people living in just one city—Latur—but the objective was primarily to give a strong message to the government that it “could not turn a blind eye to the plight of people”.
Picking up a cue, the Association of Hotels and Restaurants in Mumbai announced that it would appeal to customers not to expect their glasses to be filled up when they sit down in a restaurant. They can simply pour water as much as they need from a jug kept on the table. This will ensure that they do not leave behind a half-filled glass which goes waste. Again, this step will not be enough to meet the thirst of people living in parched Maharashtra, but is a reflection of the sensitivity towards the hardship being faced by fellow citizens.
That it required the Supreme Court to actually wake up the government to the suffering of the people living in the drought-prone areas shows how insensitive the administration has become. An estimated 700 million people are reeling under a severe drought—the second in a row—and the government, as well as the mainline media, had remained oblivious to the crisis in the country’s hinterland. A significant proportion of 10 states was reeling under a back-to-back drought. Continuous dry spell had withered crops, forcing farmers to first abandon animals and then migrate as the misery compounded.
Several regions, including Marathwada in Maharashtra, were hit by drought for the third year in a row. Maharashtra had declared drought in 14,708 of the state’s 43,000 villages in October 2015 itself. As many as 127 talukas in 27 out of 30 districts of Karnataka were declared drought-hit in September 2015. The drought situation in some areas is still worse. Palamu district in Jharkhand has been faced with five drought years in a six-year period. In Bundelkhand too, the story has been the same. The misery is lit large on the faces of the people reeling under drought.
Travelling through most of the drought-affected states in the last few months, one is appalled to find the disconnect that prevails. People in cities have no inkling of the miserable conditions in their own backyard. They believe that the drought reports they read in the newspapers are stories of sufferings in Ethiopia. I wonder what would have Shastri done to build up compassion in an otherwise insensitive nation towards the grave water crisis if he were alive today.
hunger55@gmail.com
Sharma is an agriculture specialist