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Forgetting Science
Indian politicians take great pride in the country being a major
scientific nation, what with all the nuclear power plants, missiles
and atomic bombs that we build and the software exports we achieve.
True, indeed, but if for one moment they were to look at the
working of the government, they will find that there is no science
in official decision-making. Almost as if the technocrats and
bureaucrats have never heard of this word.
In the last editor’s page, I had pointed out to the ‘water
illiteracy’ of Gujarat major irrigation projects’
minister, Jay Narayan Vyas, this time I would like to talk about
a similar illiteracy afflicting most of the state’s irrigation
engineers. Business Standard, The Times of India,
The Hindu and Indian Express have carried articles
over the last one month saying that the construction of check
dams in parched Saurashtra, which the state government is promoting
as a measure to fight drought, will mean that the medium-sized
dams that have been built in the region to meet the needs of
towns will be prevented from getting water and there will be
major urban-rural conflicts. A columnist wrote in The Times
of India, Ahmedabad edition, that “at many places in
Amreli and Rajkot districts, people are engaged in building
check dams on upper levels of rivers which must flow ordinarily
to the reservoirs situated at lower levels. Once the river flow
is impeded at the upper level, dams will hardly get enough water
and this will create friction between urban and rural masses.
It may happen that some of these check dams would be broken
in the future by the people themselves suffering at lower levels.”
The maximum opposition appears to be coming from the Rajkot
Municipal Corporation, which is opposing the construction of
check dams in the catchment areas of the reservoirs on the Aji
and Bhadar rivers. It is being argued that the Aji reservoir
has never overflowed in the last 15 years as there are around
40-50 check dams in its catchment. It is interesting to note
that, in an article published in The Indian Express,
New Delhi, all senior irrigation officials agree with the thesis
that check dams will stop water inflow to the government’s
mega-structures which support the water needs of towns and cities,
except for one senior irrigation official who defends check
dams on the grounds that villagers, too, have the right to get
water.
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Water harvesting
structures do not reduce the quantity of water flowing
into the lower dams, they only streamline the flow
over the year |
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Indeed, check dams raise both moral and scientific issues.
The moral issue is that a democratic government does not have
the right to allocate water, which is such a basic human need,
to urban people at the expense of rural people. It must ensure
that all people get water and if it is in short supply, all
must share the shortage equally. The government’s large
and medium water projects have largely benefited the urban
people and the richer rural people, leaving the poor out.
Now that check dams and groundwater recharge can help poorer
people, the richer ones are showing off their ‘technical
wisdom’ to argue against them.
It is amazing that even minister Vyas, a politician, supports
this thesis. In an article published in the Business Standard,
he is reported to have said, “With the construction of
check dams in catchment areas of dams like Aji, Shader, Fofal
and others in the Saurashtra region, their reservoirs will
not fill up if it rains just 150-200 mm. This is because the
earth is parched and water from the first few showers will
percolate into the ground. Most of the water will be stored
in the check dams, reducing the flow to the dams.” So
these check dams “could exacerbate the rural-urban divide
and take a violent turn,” says another article in The
Times of India, Ahmedabad. There are now reported to be some
70 large and medium dams in the five districts of Saurashtra.
After the last monsoon, almost 60 of them went dry while the
remaining 10 only have scanty water, which could simply be,
as I pointed out in my last column, because they were getting
water from larger catchments which have a very low water yield
in drought years. But when the government built these large
structures to feed urban Saurashtra and calmly reallocated
their water in last year’s shortage to urban areas, leading
to rural protests in which three people were shot dead by
the police in Falla in December last year, it did not bat
an eyelid.
Let’s forget morality for a moment and talk about science.
Will these check dams really reduce water inflow into the
larger downstream reservoirs? This is exactly what the Rajasthan
irrigation department told Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) when it
built its first johad in Alwar district and ordered it to
be pulled down. tbs refused and the officialdom could not
pick up the courage to take on the ire of the villagers. tbs
went ahead making many more johads and in the 503 sq km watershed
of the 45-km-long Arvari river some 238 water harvesting structures
had been constructed by the mid-1990s by the 70 villages located
within its watershed. The work started in 1986 and, lo and
behold, the Arvari, till then a drain that flowed during the
monsoon did not dry up but slowly became a perennial river.
In 1990, it had a flow till October and, by 1995, it had become
perennial. tbs now lays claim to revival of five rivers. The
Sadguru Foundation working in the tribal areas of Dahod district
in Gujarat itself has seen the same revival of rivers by making
a cascade of check dams across what were earlier dead rivers.
Rajasthan irrigation engineers were dumbfounded by the revival
of the Arvari proving their technical whims and fancies wrong.
Hydrogeologist R N Athavale who visited the Arvari watershed
has made the following estimates based on his experience to
explain the revival of rivers. Earlier, only 15 per cent of
the rainfall would go into the soil 5 per cent becoming soil
moisture and about 10 per cent going deep into the ground,
most of it below the bottom of the wells and the level of
the Arvari bed because of the depleted groundwater reserve.
Therefore, only 5 per cent of the rainfall would slowly seep
into the Arvari and villagers could use just about 1 per cent
for drinking and irrigation. Now, with check dams, 35 per
cent goes into the soil instead of 15 per cent. As a result,
the monsoonal runoff to the Arvari has dropped from the earlier
35 per cent of the rainfall to only 10 per cent. But an estimated
22 per cent of the total rainfall now seeps into the Arvari
from the recharged groundwater reserve in the post-monsoonal
months to give it a perennial flow. The villagers themselves
now use about 3 per cent of the total rainfall that falls
in the watershed with which they can take two crops a year.
In other words, as Athavale puts it, check dams and other
water harvesting structures do not reduce the quantity of
water flowing into the lower dams built by the governments,
they only streamline the flow over the year. But who is to
teach hydrology to our irrigation engineers? For a few years
indeed, as the depleted groundwater reserves are being built
up, there may be reduced flows but then cities like Rajkot
should also learn to catch their own rainwater and use water
carefully something that no city in India feels compelled
to do on its own simply due to the largesse it gets from the
government. The trouble lies in the fact that our irrigation
engineers, civil engineers as they usually are, have become
petty wall-builders sometimes across the river and at other
times along the sides of the river and have no understanding
of hydrology. And, of course, less said about the intellect
of our politicians the better. I won’t even call them
Gobar Ganesh because I have great respect for gobar
(cowdung).
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