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Out of focus

  • 14/06/2001

Out of focus The biggest hurdle in providing the much-needed drought relief is corruption in the government machinery. Rajasthan has spent almost Rs 6,500 crore on drought relief works like employment generation, fodder distribution and drinking water facilities in the past 45 years. Another Rs 628 crore has been spent in the last 27 years to stop the spread of the Thar desert. But there is no impact. Three of the districts in the Thar, Jodhpur, Churu and Barmer, have had drought in 31 of the past 38 years. The state government admitted that there were huge leakages in its drought relief works last year, and officials say at least 30-40 per cent of the money never reached the people.

In the case of the districts in the Nasik division of Maharashtra, the public distribution system ( pds ) has collapsed. Recent raids on some pds shops revealed that the foodgrain meant for drought-hit tribal people was being diverted to black market. It might have caused the food scarcity in a drought year, which claimed the lives of 8,000 children. “Today Rs 60 out of Rs 100 in wage schemes is reserved for wages, but in reality only Rs 10-15 actually goes to the poor worker, the rest is illegal income for bureaucracy, contractors and politicians,” notes the approach paper of the Planning Commission for the Tenth Five Year Plan. Whatever actually reaches the people in the name of drought relief is not spent wisely, and doesn’t go a long way in drought-proofing.

“Drought is not like most other disasters: it can be seen coming, slowly, from a long way off,” wrote Lloyd Timberlake in Africa in Crisis , a book on drought in Africa. India has seen it come for almost 5,000 years. How can such a frequent phenomena become a disaster in Rajasthan, where drought extended to 16 of the last 20 years? Drought becomes an annual disaster when effort is not made to drought-proof

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