Another disaster in the making

Drought in India's rural hinterland is centrally a political issue and not exclusively a meteorological effect. For over a century, colonial and post-colonial governments in New Delhi have been slowly starving the Indian countryside and the majority of its rural populace with policies and technologies that have systematically eroded the ecological viability of village units. The creative traditions of rainwater harvesting, cropping strategies to cope with rainfall variability and the careful tapping of drainage basins have been relentlessly snuffed out. What we are witnessing today is not drought per se but rural India's extreme social and economic vulnerability to meteorological variation. A technology-first central bureaucracy has rendered it unable to respond creatively, locally, to varying levels of rainfall.

Simultaneous with the dramatic transformation of the rural ecology, urban myths about the agrarian world and its productive possibilities have flourished. Notably, the idea has been promoted that there is an intrinsic worth to indiscriminately extending perennial canal irrigation, cash crop monocultures and increasing crop yields by industrialising agricultural inputs and operations. If anything, the drought of this year has clearly revealed that there is a heavy ecological price tag on the sustained reorganisation of the countryside as a colony of the city. Further, highly skewed property and power relations in the village, along with a sharp imbalance in the terms of trade between the rural and urban sectors, have also significantly sapped the ecological resilience of India's vast agrarian hinterland. In other words, the national economy's relentless demand for a specific type and level of agricultural productivity is undermining the fragile equilibrium of land, forest, river and field.