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| Hit by drought, will India stave off famine? |
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Sunday, August 16, 2009
Aakar Patel
India has seen many droughts since 1947, but no famine. Drought is the shortage of rain; famine is the shortage of food. As of August 14, of India's 626 districts, 177 are in drought. Three fourths of India's annual rain falls between June and September. What this means is that if the monsoon, which has vanished over Indian skies, does not reappear quickly, the drought could become famine.
The government does not think so, and economist Amartya Sen agrees. He theorised that famine was not the shortage of food: it was the shortage of money to buy food. In a democracy, he wrote in 1981, there could be no famine because an elected government does not let its voters starve to death. And so far he has been proved correct: the last famine in India was in 1943, in Bengal, which was then united.
Bengal has had two major famines that we know of. The first was in 1770, 13 years after Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey. One crore (10 million) people, one fifth of the area's population, died of starvation that year. Clive committed suicide four years later, but not from guilt.
The second Bengal famine was in 1943, in which thirty lakh people (three million) died. Britain was diverting India's resources to its war effort. The pain of this famine was observed by the 10-year-old Amartya Sen, who did his research on hunger after that when he became an economist. He went around villages on his bicycle with weighing scales and measured infants for malnourishment. It was for this work that he won the Nobel for economics in 1998.
There were many famines during British rule. One crore (10 million) people died in Central India in a famine that began in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. One in South India in 1877 killed 50 lakh (five million) people.
Gujaratis are familiar with the famine of 1900. They know it as the Chhappaniyo (the fifty-sixer) because AD 1900 is 1956 in the Vikram Samvat calendar. I was startled one evening watching PTV when a villager in Sindh referred to the Chhappaniyo.
In his book The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, Achyut Yagnik wrote how the British were keen on economising during famine relief in that year. From offering 1.13 kilos of grain as wages to workers at relief camps, they then gave 850 grams, and that was reduced further, for those who hadn't delivered 'minimum' output of work, to 500 grams. This kind of cruelty had a terrible outcome.
In Bombay province alone, which included Gujarat and Sindh, seven and a half lakh (750,000) people died, and a visiting journalist, William Digby, estimated the deaths to be twice that number.
The Gujarati trader in the cities did nothing to help and a biography written by Bhailalbhai Patel reported the prostitution and the begging in Gujarat's villages, while there were lakhs of rupees with the Jain and Hindu temple trusts. The only people who helped, he wrote, were the Christian missionaries who "begged for funds from Europe and America to rescue lakhs of people."
This did not go unnoticed. The number of Christians in Kheda district (where my family is from) went from 500 to 25,000 in two years between 1899 and 1901. Yagnik notices that there is very little reference to this catastrophe in Gujarat's literature. Indians ignore this sort of thing and just move on, though we get very angry with the missionaries for their conversions.
After independence, irrigation became a big project under Nehru. Giant dams, and they are really quite large, were raised at Bhakra, Farakka, Nagarjuna and across the Damodar Valley. Nehru loved scale and modernity and called dams the new temples of India.
Pakistan is fortunate that over 60 per cent of its population lives in Punjab, the best-irrigated part of the sub-continent because of the British.
In his book Indian Army and the Making of Punjab, Ranjib Majumder wrote that from 12 lakh (1.2 million) acres, land irrigated by canals in Punjab increased more than tenfold to 1.35 crore (13.5 million) acres by 1940, about half of all irrigated land in undivided India.
East Punjab is today 98 per cent irrigated and insulated from drought, unlike larger states like Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.
In his book Canal Irrigation in British India, Ian Stone wrote that a lot of the British work was actually an extension of indigenous projects. The Western Yamuna Canal was first excavated under Firoz Shah Tughlaq in the 14th century, and extended to Delhi under Shah Jahan by engineer Ali Murdan Khan. The Eastern Yamuna Canal was restored to Sahranpur by the Rohillas in 1784. And it wasn't just north India. The Grand Anicut dam over the Cauvery in South India was built by the Chola Empire in the second century BC and is still working.
But irrigation still touches only 40 per cent of India's farmed land. A full 60 per cent of the land depends on the heavens to water its crop. This year will be a disaster for the farmers on that land, because the rainfall in June was the poorest in 83 years. India, like Pakistan, has two main crops. Kharif is sown in the monsoon and Rabi is sown in the spring.
Kharif output can be directly proportional to shortage of rain. In 2002, the monsoon deficit, meaning the amount of rainfall less than normal, was 19 per cent. The deficit in Kharif crop was also 19 per cent.
There are some options for the farmer and in case the rains fail, he can switch to short-duration crops like dal, and Kharif sowing can be extended up to October. But rice will be hit because it is raised in nurseries and transplanted in water-filled fields.
The US Department of Agriculture has projected India's rice output to be 8.4 crore (84 million) tons, down from 10 crore (100 million) tons, a little less than a fourth of the world's production. China, the world's largest rice grower, and consumer, produces 13 crore (130 million) tons of it.
One problem India has is that 43 per cent of its peasants either have no land or just half an acre of land. A rising population has divided property through inheritance.
Half an acre is 40 metres by 50 metres. This will at best yield 500 kilos of wheat, worth about Rs 7,000, and the same weight in rice, worth about Rs 3,500 to the farmer. Not enough to live off.
Yields in India are currently stagnant after a jump during the Green Revolution between 1965 and 1980. They can increase again if companies buy land off peasants and operate giant farms. This cannot happen now because ownership of agricultural land is restricted. India's government does not allow corporates into farming because it worries that peasants are not prudent. They will take the money from the sale of land and, unaccustomed to dealing with capital, will soon spend it and be left with no income or stability. There is a truth to that.
What will this drought mean for the economy? India slipped from over eight per cent growth last year and will grow at between five and six per cent this year. Agriculture's contribution to India's GDP was 30 per cent in 2001-2002, but it has fallen to 17 per cent now as manufacturing and, especially, services, has galloped in growth. But the number of Indians dependent on agriculture has not dropped at the same rate, and about half of India is dependent on farm income. Many of these people have jobs in towns where they labour during the off-season for farming, but the farm remains their primary source of income, and source of stability and identity.
While the contribution of farmers to India's recent economic growth has been little, this is changing. Economists now think that India can continue to be on its high growth path of eight per cent or more only if rural India gets into the cycle of middle-class consumption. For this to happen it is necessary that rural Indians, or farmers, have surplus money. That is not going to be possible this year.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@hillroadmedia.com
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