The work I do — editing the work of journalists reporting on water issues in the Himalayan region — gives me a close-up of how climate change is disrupting agriculture. Almost 80 per cent of water usage in India, and most of its neighbouring countries, is for agriculture. Much of this water comes from the three to four months of the monsoon (except for Afghanistan and China). As a result, we are critically dependent on rainfall for our crops, but also, what is more important, for the livelihood of hundreds of millions of farmers.

Climate change is disrupting all of this. The physics of it is simple. Hotter air holds more water. This means that it takes more water in the air for it to rain now than it did earlier. Also, when it rains, the amount of water is huge. Therefore the most visible effects of climate change are longer droughts and more frequent floods.

This is a massive change. Farming in South Asia has followed fairly settled patterns for thousands of years based on a steady monsoon. Farming practices are built around this long history of knowledge. Weather fluctuations are not a new phenomenon — there were floods and droughts in the past, too, but their frequency has gone up.

When crops fail due to too much or ill-timed rain, or even no rain, farmers have little choice except to sell their labour at the best price they can negotiate. Given the many millions of livelihoods at stake, they are open to exploitation. It would be easier if they had the option for other jobs. They do not, and this is the crisis playing out across India.

When I mentioned this at a recent gathering, one person asked, “But what jobs can we create in small towns and villages?” This is the wrong question. As the economy of the erstwhile USSR proved, States are not particularly good at creating jobs. But they provide other services: Security, infrastructure, a judicial system that can be relied upon to settle disputes without fear or favour and so on.

People come to big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai or Bengaluru in search of jobs. Those jobs exist because it is much easier to invest in a metropolis. The chance of being bullied by people with connections are lower — marginally — as is the chance of a babu sitting on a file, or of the police successfully pursuing a trumped-up charge. Numerous scandals have shown us that those on the margins of big cities still face these issues. The exploitation of a poor farmer in a village is not even news for most. We are aware of tens of thousands of suicides and it does not move us.

In big cities connections still matter, but in small towns and villages, they are everything. Given this bitter truth, why would any sensible person — unless he or she is able to tackle the system — invest in a small town or village? Why would a foreign investor even think about it?

People in the villages are critically deprived of the opportunity to live with dignity in their land. There is a saying that the youth and the water of the mountains do not stay in the region they are from. This has only accelerated in the last few years as mismanaged hydropower projects — with dubious environmental clearances and little input from the community — led to landslides that destroyed roads and crippled the lives of people who are already paying the price of changing weather patterns.

Unless we empower these communities to deal with climate change and other life-altering conditions, we will be looking at a tide of misery that will swamp our little islands of privilege. There are some initiatives that are showing promise — the revival of small check dams in Bundelkhand, for instance, in order to fight drought in the region. The use of ducks in West Bengal — especially by young women in the villages — to clear rice fields of weeds and pests is another example. There is, though, limited understanding of what succeeds and what doesn’t. ‘Development’ is planned in the corridors of power in Delhi and the state capitals, and the voices from the far-flung areas seldom reach these portals. How smart will our smart cities look when surrounded by towns and villages abandoned by people who have to scrounge for a living outside their comfort zones?

BLINKOMAIR

Omair Ahmad

 

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; Twitter: @OmairTAhmad

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