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`Have tornado, will travel'
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While a `revived' monsoon might hold out some hope of a limited agricultural recovery, in parts of rural India it might actually divert the attention on the countryside. This is because the issue, drought or no drought, is one of largescale, and misreported, hunger, compounded, ironically, by a comfortable food situation. In all this, the media has a positive role to play, says noted journalist P. SAINATH, in the conclusion of a two-part article.
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Even drought at its blistering best can't match the pull of a fashion week.
THE top travel agency executive called me aside after the meeting. We had just finished a discussion on the Media and Natural Calamity. "I couldn't raise this from the audience," he said. "But I wanted to tell you anyway. Know what happens when there's a flood in Bangladesh? Some in our trade get very busy. They block scores of seats on international flights bound for Dhaka.
"There are actually people calling up friends in Bangladesh. `How bad is the damage? Is it really bad? How many dead?'" they ask anxiously. "They want to know how many seats to block. They know that reporters and TV crews from the West will be flying in." The greater the disaster, the more the media inflow.
"You can tick us off for failing as citizens. But you media guys are no better than us. We're both in it as a trade. We do what we do as a business. You guys do the same, but make out as if you're acting in `conscience'."
Touché. How the people of Bangladesh do before and after that flood is of no interest. Much greater problems plague them, but don't make news. The "national" media, too, cover rural India in much the way the western media cover us. We go there when we sense natural disaster. The greater the scale, the more of us who go in. The rest of the year, the crisis that rages in rural India gets the odd mention. No more.
It's heartening, though, that there's a growing number of journalists, mainly younger ones, who want to do better than that. For them, and a few old hands, the disaster presents a chance to persuade their reluctant bosses that there's something worth covering in the countryside. They then try to work in issues beyond the drought into their reports. I, for one, admire and respect that.
There's also no doubt that the press has given the dry spell this year far more space. There have been some fine stories from individual reporters.
Yet, the travel executive was right on the larger picture.
His suggested slogan for the media: "Have tornado, will travel."
But even drought at its blistering best can't match the pull of Lakme India Fashion Week. That had some 400 journalists covering it this month. Last year, there were some 220 hacks reporting this event. Almost one for each of the 250 buyers who showed up (The Hindu Sunday Magazine, September 2, 2001). This year, the journos may well have outnumbered the buyers. We don't know yet. Watch this space.
Contrast that with the number of reporters assigned to cover agrarian distress as a beat. (Roughly zero, if we mean full timers. And a handful if we look at it in terms of "The Drought".) Where did rural India go wrong? Perhaps not enough people are dying to rouse serious media interest. Maybe it needs a "Drop-Dead-in-the-Drought Week" to get that kind of attention.
Meanwhile, many seem surprised by the Government's late response to the situation. That is, more than halfway through the monsoon. Actually, it's of a piece with how agriculture and the rural poor have been treated this past decade or so.
If anything, the late rains raise more hope of some limited recovery than any actions of the Government. If the present rains in Andhra Pradesh keep up, late sowing is possible in a few regions. At least on about half the intended acreage. It's a big if, but the possibility exists. The rains, in other States raise similar, if limited hopes.
Governments, too, have embraced the media's "If it bleeds, it leads" logic. If people are not dying, it's okay. Something like the Kashipur hunger deaths in Orissa does bring about unwelcome scrutiny. But if you can keep the death count down, it's managable. Acute distress can be brazened out across a few weeks with the standard mantras. Then it's business as usual.
Here's the Union agriculture minister's take on it. "Farmers will be hit but consumers are unlikely to feel the impact." Ajit Singh has said that more than once. Farmers and consumers. It's an interesting division. Farmers are also consumers, but that's another story.
Much of the complacence springs from the majestic mountain of grain lying with us. All 63 million tons of it. A "comfortable food situation" in official reckoning.
The food situation was quite comfortable when the Kashipur deaths took place. It was more than comfortable when farmers committed suicide in large numbers during the past few years. It was pretty comfortable last year when 25,000 rural poor in A.P. attacked godowns with the stated aim of giving the grain there to the hungry amongst them.
They were raiding the godowns because that's where the grain is. Lots of it. Indeed, a most comfortable stock in each one of them. Those marching to the godowns, whether in A.P. or Rajasthan, were demanding the launch of major food-for-work programmes.
Most governments, however, are not comfortable with the idea of real food-for-work programmes. And really uncomfortable when the poor threaten to organise these on their own. So, in A.P., thousands of policemen guarded the godowns for weeks. To protect the comfortable food position from the uncomfortable hungry. Around a thousand of those leading the charge on the godowns were arrested. Some of them were jailed for over a fortnight.
The growing mountains of grain capture well the rising inequality amongst us. They scale the new heights of policy-driven cruelty. And tell us a lot about what has happened to the purchasing power of the poor.
The Ganesh Immersion ceremony...a "water struggle" for political reasons.
The late or failed rains add to the misery of many. But for a sense of how those now in power might view water and rainfall issues, let's step back a year.
It was early September 2001 and a biting dry phase had gripped parts of A.P.. From Mahbubnagar in Telangana to Anantapur in Rayalaseema, even drinking water was a problem. People were getting mutinous. But no one knew quite what to do. Into this breach stepped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), gallantly to the rescue. The party knew what it had to do. It sought to lead people in a "water struggle".
BJP units went on marches and protests, even hunger strikes. They demanded the release of lots of water from the KC Canal and other sources.
Very nice, but what they were demanding was water for the Ganapati (Ganesh) idol immersion ceremony. In regions where, normally, small idols of Ganesh are left in little ponds or wells, the saffron mob had forged a new spectacle. An ancient "tradition" just a few years old. Hundreds of large, even giant Ganesh idols taken out in trucks and lorries. I spent hours at an intersection, stuck in one of these divine traffic jams. But with lakes and even rivers running dry, there was no water to immerse them. Hence the BJP's call for the release of water from the canals.
The demand, which enraged farmers, was turned down. One outcome was a landscape littered with large, forlorn-looking plaster idols of Ganesh. These lay under bridges, on dry river beds and often just by the roadside. In one block, some farmers offered the local BJP leader powerful disincentives and even the demand was dropped.
The idols deserted by the wayside were all that remained of the "struggle". That and a lesson on how the BJP approaches issues of this nature.
Drought did not cause the food crisis. Rainfall will not end it. Drought, alas, is a normal, recurrent feature of climate. Its nature varies vastly by region. But it is still a feature of almost all climatic zones. With sense and planning, we can decide how much of a disaster it becomes.
Drought is the season the media get to flaunt their social conscience. But that farmer staring wistfully at the sky must have a crick in his neck by now from holding that pose so long for so many insistent camera persons.
There's plenty the media can do if they wish to. For one, don't just cover drought. Cover deprivation. Stop treating the countryside as some homogenous entity and look deeper at the crisis, class-wise. Look at how policy has spurred inequality. How it has seen the growth of hunger in the weakest sections of society. How do we explain their worsening state even in years when there is no drought?
Many of the questions we ask people in the countryside about corruption, relief work and implementation would fetch largely the same answers at any other time of the year. Not just during the drought. There are problems in the countryside that haven't a hope in hell of being solved with "relief work".
Stop assuming that, somehow, the basic policies are okay. That it's corruption that foils them. The big corruption is in the policy. A set of policies that savaged the livelihoods of the poor during the 1990s.
As Prof. Utsa Patnaik points out: "In the year 2001, the availability of cereals in the country dropped to an all-time low of less than 143 kg per head. That of pulses fell to below 10 kg." The last time we saw such levels, "was just before World War II, in the hungry 1930s of colonial times. And again, briefly for two years during the food crisis of the mid-1960s. An average family of five members consumed 114 kg less of foodgrain" than they did in the early 1990s — " a massive decline".
There's the big story. You can find it reflected in tens of millions of poor households. Try getting them to tell their story, not just the one about drought.
Meanwhile, it's vital to see that real food for work programmes get going. Not by cheating people on the cash component. But by paying them two-thirds of the wages in grain and the rest in cash. There is an urgent need to crack down on profiteering in the sale of water. There's also a desperate need to help people have their livestock survive by getting fodder to them. The media, too, could play a role by forcing governments to act in those directions.
It would be a shame if the arrival of some rains just washed those issues away. For, as my friend Shankar Singh in Rajasthan put it to me last year: "In the homes of the poor, there is always drought."
(Concluded)
The first part of this article appeared in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, issue dated August 11, 2002.
P. Sainath is one of the recipients of the A.H. Boerma Award, 2001, granted for his contributions in changing the nature of the development debate on food, hunger and rural development in the Indian media.
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