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Correspondent

21 August 2024 at 3:50:16 pm

Arid State

Maharashtra has finally put an official number on a crisis that farmers have been experiencing for weeks. The state government has declared 265 of its 358 talukas drought-affected, activating the first stage of its drought-management framework. The scale of the distress should make this more than another seasonal relief exercise. It is a reminder that water stress is no longer an episodic crisis but a recurring governance challenge. The state received 798.2 mm of rain against a normal 970.9...

Arid State

Maharashtra has finally put an official number on a crisis that farmers have been experiencing for weeks. The state government has declared 265 of its 358 talukas drought-affected, activating the first stage of its drought-management framework. The scale of the distress should make this more than another seasonal relief exercise. It is a reminder that water stress is no longer an episodic crisis but a recurring governance challenge. The state received 798.2 mm of rain against a normal 970.9 mm between June 1 and September 26, a deficit of 18 percent. The first drought trigger is activated when rainfall falls more than 25 percent below normal and is accompanied by a prolonged dry spell of 21 days. Though the aggregate state deficit is lower than that threshold, the taluka-level assessment has established the conditions required for intervention. Except for five districts, rainfall has been deficient across the state. The government has ordered a stay on the recovery of agriculture-related loans and restructuring of crop loans, while extending concessions on electricity bills for agricultural pumps. Employment Guarantee Scheme norms are to be relaxed; food grains provided to farmers and arrangements made for drinking water and fodder. Crop-loss surveys will determine the eventual financial assistance. While these measures can cushion the shock, they cannot solve the problem. Maharashtra has lived with drought long enough for drought relief to have become an administrative routine. The more difficult question is why the state repeatedly finds itself having to mobilise the same machinery. Tankers, fodder camps, loan restructuring and employment guarantees are indispensable when the rains fail. But they are essentially the politics and economics of response, not resilience. The state has considerable experience in watershed development, farm ponds, check dams, groundwater recharge and other forms of water conservation. Yet the effectiveness of such interventions depends less on announcing them than on where they are built, whether they are maintained and whether groundwater extraction is regulated. Large-scale water-conservation works announced as part of the present relief package must therefore be judged by measurable outcomes rather than expenditure. There is a larger agricultural question. A state with highly variable rainfall cannot indefinitely expand water-intensive cropping patterns in regions whose hydrology cannot support them. Crop choices, irrigation efficiency and groundwater management have to become part of drought policy rather than being treated as separate subjects. The present declaration should consequently be viewed as both relief and warning. While the relief is urgent, the warning is structural. The state government cannot control the monsoon but it can decide how much water it captures when the rains arrive, how efficiently it uses what it stores and how resilient its farmers are when the skies fail. A drought code can declare an emergency. But only sustained water management can prevent the emergency from becoming routine.

Seeking Urban Validation

Correspondent
Feb 11
3 min read

The ruling Congress faces an acid test in the high-stakes Telangana civic polls.

Telangana
Telangana

While the noise in Telangana’s urban local body elections has subsided and the people have cast their votes, the stakes have only sharpened further. The fate of 3,000 municipal seats across 116 towns and seven corporations will be decided. On February 13. This time, the Telangana civic poll contest, like that of Maharashtra, is about political momentum in a state still adjusting to the upheavals of 2023.


For the ruling Congress, the vote is an early verdict on its two-year-old government in the State. It is also a test of whether the party’s dramatic rural comeback can be replicated in cities. Telangana’s political geography is lopsided: of its 119 assembly seats, 80 are rural. It was there that the Congress staged its revival in 2023, reducing the once-dominant Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) to just 19 rural seats from 62 five years earlier. Yet the cities told a different story. In Hyderabad, the BRS retained its urban heft while the Congress failed to win a single assembly seat.


That imbalance haunts the Congress now. Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy has framed the civic polls as a referendum on welfare schemes and administrative rectitude, repeatedly accusing the previous BRS regime of having “looted” the state. He has also sought to reassure minorities by committing to protect the 4 percent reservation for OBC Muslims. But the subtext is clearer than the slogans: unless the Congress can break into urban Telangana, its grip on power will remain structurally fragile. Party insiders privately acknowledge that a strong showing is essential ahead of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation elections, which loom later this year.


For the BRS, these polls are existential. The party that once dominated Telangana politics is still struggling to recalibrate after its 2023 defeat. Its patriarch, K. Chandrashekar Rao, has retreated from the public gaze, depriving the party of its most formidable campaigner. The burden has fallen on his son and heir, K. T. Rama Rao (KTR), whose aggressive tone marks a departure from his earlier technocratic image. The civic polls will test whether he can convert visibility into authority.


Complicating matters are the party’s internal fissures. The defection last year of KCR’s daughter, K. Kavitha, who has since accused the leadership of illicit enrichment, has dented the party’s aura of cohesion, even if she has stopped short of forming a rival outfit. Still, writing off the BRS would be premature. Unlike during its decade in power, when the Congress often appeared comatose, BRS leaders have been conspicuously active on the ground, probing administrative lapses and amplifying urban discontent.


The Bharatiya Janata Party, meanwhile, sees opportunity in the turbulence. Having won eight of Telangana’s 17 parliamentary seats in 2024 (mostly in urban constituencies) it hopes to translate its national gains into municipal footholds. Its campaign has leaned heavily on Hindutva, with senior leaders alleging that Hindus were being taken for granted under Congress rule. Yet the BJP’s ambitions are constrained. Its NDA ally, the Jana Sena Party, has fielded hundreds of candidates, muddying arithmetic and message alike. Even so, party strategists calculate that a fragmented opposition and latent anti-incumbency could expand their modest municipal presence.


Hovering at the margins, yet indispensable in Hyderabad, is the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. Asaduddin Owaisi’s party has avoided confrontation with the Congress, speaking instead of the need for independent Muslim leadership and hinting at post-poll arrangements. In a fractured verdict, its councillors could once again play kingmaker.


A Congress surge in the results would validate its rural mandate in the Assembly polls in the urban areas as well. A BRS revival would signal that the party still has clout in the cities it built its power on. BJP gains would confirm Telangana as an emerging three-cornered contest rather than a bipolar one.


Either way, the intense campaigning for the Telangana civic polls prove that they are nothing short of a dress rehearsal for the state’s political future.

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