Naidu goes whole hog on water conservation

By Dasu Kesava Rao

HYDERABAD, MAY 24. Two Assembly constituencies -- Bhongir and Chevella -- are going to the polls on Friday and the Telugu Desam mini-Mahanadu, the party's AGM, is due this weekend.

As head of the ruling party, Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu ought to be worrying about the two high-priority items. No. Instead, all his focus is on water harvesting and conservation to see that the dreaded drought does not revisit the State. Water conservation has become a magnificent obsession with the Chief Minister who believes that it is probably the only solution to the problem of recurring drought. He is commending a Rs. 200-crore project to the World Bank for its assistance for water conservation movement.

Mr. Naidu talks about it all the time and on all occasions -- in Janmabhoomi and Dial Your CM interactions, at media interviews, at party meetings and in videoconferences with senior bureaucrats. An old hand at power-point presentations on a variety of subjects -- Vision 2020, power reforms, origin and growth of the Telugu Desam, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu marshalled facts, figures and quotations from all the world last week to drive home to his Cabinet colleagues, MPs and Ministers how important it is to conserve every drop of water.

As the State reels under acute drought, he made ``Neeru-Meeru'' (water and you) the theme for the Janmabhoomi earlier this month. Instead of making political exhortations on the virtues of saving water, he chooses to flood the audience with statistical information.

In his presentation, ``Water, the gift of life,'' the Chief Minister begins with a Benjamin Franklin quote,``When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.'' Only 2.5 per cent of world's water is fresh, the rest salty. Water is not forever. The per capita availability in India is down by half in 50 years. Back home, at average annual rainfall of 896 mm, AP receives 2.44 lakh million cubic metres of rain on the 2.74 lakh sq.km area. Of this, 35.7 per cent evaporates and 40 per cent is surface run-off that drains into the sea. Only 14.3 per cent of it (or 1,230 tmcft) is absorbed as groundwater and another 10 per cent retained as soil moisture.

The pressure on water is clear from the increase in the number of wells from 8.20 lakh to 22.22 lakh in the past 25 years and the area irrigated is up from one million hectares to over 2.5 million ha.

With watershed development effort enlisting people's participation more than a modest success in the State, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu recently set up a Water Conservation mission with Mr. Anna Hazare and others. The impact of watershed development, construction of check dams, percolation tanks, contour trenching, etc, has been encouraging. Vegetative cover is up by 11 per cent in the China Darapally watershed in Mahbubnagar district and by 34 per cent in Mr. Naidu's home constituency of Kuppam in five years. The number of problem (drinking water) villages in Kurnool district is about 90 now against 258 a few years ago. It was only 17 last September.

Huge earth-movers were a rare sight not long ago. Today, close to 1,000 of them are busy in all the districts desilting tanks and digging contour trenches as part of a 60-day action plan to harvest rainwater to the maximum.

The Government is coming up with a legislation shortly to make it mandatory for all houses in urban areas to have rainwater harvesting structures and minimum tree plantation. Industrial houses will be required to set up such structures. It is also planned to restore defunct lakes and tanks, some of which were encroached upon and converted into house plots. Mr. Naidu has promised to be ruthless with encroachers.

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