Dying for water
sectarian violence is passe. In keeping with the latest trends today, blood is being spilt over water - an inalienable right which can no longer be taken for granted. The daily news contains harrowing accounts of people facing the drought in Gujarat. With the worst days still ahead, the situation demands long-term solutions immediately because the people are no longer willing to take denial of access to natural resources lying down. None of these solutions include use of arms.
Against this backdrop observe the following: the water riots in Chinnaganjam village of Prakasam district in Andhra Pradesh on February 11 this year culminated in police firing which resulted in the death of two persons and injuries to a few others. The incident signifies another instance of the people's resistance to conserve their resources, water in this case, and the state machinery colluding with vested interests. It also brought to the fore once again how trigger-happy the police is because they are never prosecuted for unwarranted firing.
The firing in December 1999 in Falla village in Jamnagar district of Gujarat ended with three farmers losing their lives. They were protesting against moves to take water from Kankavati dam to Jamnagar town ignoring demands for their own needs. The growing movements also signify that local people will resist when they are denied access to their own resources by an insensitive bureaucracy. It is, however, unfortunate that innocent people are falling to bullets for no fault of their own.
It is unfortunate that the conflicts arising over water issues are dealth with by force these days. If political heavyweights are involved in such agitations, limited force is used. But the security are particularly brutal on helpless villagers and common people. It is not the first time that firing was resorted to on villagers protesting for water. In the late 1993, people in Nalgonda district protested against the diversion of Krishna water to Hyderabad city without first meeting local needs. The one person who was killed in the firing turned out to be a police sub-inspector in civil dress.
It is well known that our big cities are getting more and more congested, polluted and infrastructure severely strained. Yet, all political parties support measures to invest in big cities. Development of small and medium towns in a big way would contribute to reducing pressure on these mega cities. This is what China has done during the reform process. They have developed about 50,000 small and medium towns. Whereas, in India the total number of towns is less than 5,000.
In a vast country like India, the rural people will have access to services at short distances only if small and medium towns are developed on a largescale. But the political and bureaucratic elite has high stakes in big cities because that is where their ill-gotten wealth lies. Many of the upper echelons of the bureaucracy hail from middle-class families, their training and lifestyles (at the cost of the taxpayers' money), and the enormous clout they enjoy while in service with their political masters and in recent years, with international funding agencies, makes them totally immune to the sufferings of common people.
Honest politicians and the bureaucrats, who are very few in number, feel harassed and suffocated at the hands of the people. The camaraderie between the political and the bureaucratic elite (both serving and retired) is best demonstrated during the time of allotment of prime land in big cities for housing plots. The two manage to corner the best of the available properties with scarcely a second thought. That should perhaps explain why decisions are made very easily in favour of big cities and big business that deny access of local people to local resources in the countryside.
The author is a faculty member at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad. He also heads an ngo called Academy of Human Environment and Development ( ahead ) .
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