part0016

During Easter time in 1961, I spent three weeks hitch-hiking in four countries in Europe. One morning I found a lift in a Mercedes car, from the outskirts of Bonn to Frankfurt; I picked up a conversation with the owner of the car who was driving himself. (In post-war Germany, English is compulsory, I believe, in schools—everyone speaks English well, with odd exceptions). He mentioned to me that he preferred to live in Bonn, but drive everyday to Frankfurt for work, and return in the evening (about 100 miles or about 160 kilometres each way). I recall that the run from Bonn to Frankfurt took about 75 minutes; clearly my benefactor of that day used to spend less time commuting to work each day than most urban office-workers in India. The German resurgence under Hitler could be partially attributed to the massive ‘autobahn’ programme which Germany embarked on. The post-war Marshall Plan had its major stress on creation of infrastructure; the highway programmes in mid-20th century in the US opened up the country. Thus, the road to ‘nowhere’ created new growth opportunities—Zzyzx in California and Hohokus in New Jersey are examples of road building which led to America’s prosperity. The Yamuna Expressway from NOIDA to Agra, if well managed in the next 20 years, will create high quality townships, employment and activity in the entire belt. The significance of creating infrastructure first to stimulate development has not been grasped in India.

There is little recognition in governance circles that the primary prerequisite for development is infrastructure. Thus, our agriculture is still languishing with poor growth rates due to terrible neglect of infrastructure—lack of electricity, as well as rural roads. These relate to physical infrastructure but equally failures in social infrastructure like education and public health are responsible for lack of development in rural areas; this is dealt with elsewhere. One sees the clear pattern that development is haphazard, uneven, patchy and frequently self-negating mainly due to non-creation of advance infrastructure to pave the way for planned development. This chapter addresses issues relating to the power sector, water supply as well as the roads sector, these only in a partial manner. So much really needs to be done for sanitation, management of urban populations, rural roads, airlines and port development—the list can go on. As a country we have failed to focus on the basics; lack of attention to infrastructure is a case in point.

The single most important reason why our agriculture has not developed is lack of a steady, reliable power supply in our rural areas. India sadly has not, even 70 years after independence, recognized the critical importance of reliable 24-hour power supply for development. We are unable to get the basics in position, but aspire to reach the moon.

For a regular traveller, it is necessary to know what the voltage is in the country he is visiting. In the US it is usually 110 volts ± 2%; in Singapore it is 220 ± 2% and in Switzerland it is 220 ± 1%. Visitors to India from abroad, need to prepare with special instructions. In India the prevailing voltage is 220 ± 100 per cent, that is, when it is available! My grandson who visits me every year from the US, whenever he sees the daily, frequent, irregular blackouts in NOIDA, calls it a ‘power-surge’. Apparently, due to a surge, electricity went off in New York area for a couple of hours a couple of decades back; he heard about it, and has labelled all blackouts as power-surges.

My friend from Geneva travelled on work regularly in Africa, including to the poorest countries. He mentioned to me that nowhere has he seen power cuts or blackouts. As a pure vegetarian, he would carry a small bag of rice and some pickles, along with a cup-sized rice-cooker. He was always equipped with a complicated plug-in contraption, with about 10 different types of points, to meet the socket specifications in each country. However, he mentioned to me that he had never had the problem of not being able to get electricity even in the remotest parts of Africa. Cooking in his room was his second option. His first was looking up the local phone directory on arrival, start with the 100 or more ‘Patels’ listed and telephone them one after the other, referring to an earlier imaginary visit to Geneva where they had ‘met’. By the time he got to the third Patel, they had built up enough conversation for my friend to cadge a dinner invitation; his multi-plug was rarely put to use!

The most fundamental infrastructure, ever since the time of Edison, is availability of electricity. F.D. Roosevelt, nearly a century back, had recognized this. At the time of laying the foundation for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he had declared that electricity is the ‘truest servant’ of man. In nearly every country in the world, including perhaps Zambia, Haiti, Somalia and Iceland, electric power is available in every habitation, generally always without ‘cuts’ or ‘surges’. Even in medium-and-large-size towns in India, which aspires to be a super-power, routine daily power cuts of eight hours or more is not unusual. What makes the situation worse is that the cuts are random and frequent—there is no regularity or predictability. Many rural areas in a number of states including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha often get power only for two to three hours a day. We have not been able to provide our farmers with this basic input and we complain that our agriculture has not been modernized. We expect some knight in shining armour to come from abroad with FDI and transform our agriculture and our rural areas. If this is not the height of illusion, one wonders what is.

This need not necessarily be so; we have large reserves of coal, among the largest in the world, sufficient at currently projected rates of demand for at least three or four more centuries. Contrast this with projected world petroleum/gas supply petering out in the next few decades and with gas prices going through the roof; as the prospect of petroleum shortages seeps into the market-psyche, the situation is bound to worsen dramatically. No doubt, Indian coal is not of high quality; however, beneficiation techniques are readily available, and the technology well known in India. Our failure on the power front essentially stems from not being able to manage basic optimal linkages between coal mining, railway-siding and transportation, finance requirements including guarantees etc. and coordination with State Electricity Boards. There is total failure of national policy in this vital field. Each player is asked to work out his own equations with a number of entities, each one of which considers itself ‘sovereign’. The ostensible reason for the recent humongous Coalgate scam was due to issue of licenses freely so that coal is abundantly available for generation of electricity; in the event, as is to be expected in a totally venal system, policy instruments were subverted to fatten individuals in the public and private space. The people of India have been heavily short-changed; coal supply has stagnated, while the demand-supply gap has sharply escalated in the past decade leading to increasing imports of coal at prices four or five times that of domestic coal. It is not possible to muck-up our coal/power policy anymore than now, however hard we may have tried.

One further word about our energy policies may not be out of place. India is blessed with more sunshine than nearly any other country in the world. No doubt solar technology is not developed yet to the stage where it can compete on cost with petroleum or coal energy. However, there is increasingly extensive use of solar power in many parts of the world; solar powered farms are now the new norm, say in California. New commercial models of solar powered cars are now entering markets. The day is not far when use of solar energy will become common for many or most purposes. One would have expected massive experimentation, with large government subsidies, for entrepreneurs to invest in this field in India and pioneer a new power source, an alternative to natural gas. Apparently we wish all the experimentation to be done in Germany and Japan on the solar front. There is already large-scale use of solar power in China while we appear to be passive onlookers.

Our preoccupation with nuclear energy, particularly of the third generation variety supplied by the west, is astonishingly naïve. Clearly India has learnt nothing from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan where two years after the tragedy, the core has still not been neutralized and the potential for serious nuclear pollution spread not yet been assessed; in short, the situation is far from contained. When much of the world is turning its back on nuclear power as the technology stands today, India is embracing this with open arms. This is recipe for potential disaster. Even our liability laws are tailored to meet the demands of suppliers not taking into account our national interest. There is a strong suspicion that our power policy is being influenced by a strategy mounted from far-off countries with the tacit, nay full, complicity of our decision-makers.

As of now, nuclear power accounts for only 2 per cent of India’s current production and consumption. The extraordinary attention given to this segment, by encouraging new nuclear plants against international trends and arguably at great risk to the populace is inexplicable. The main attention given to thermal power based on Indian coal, accounting for 70 per cent of production in recent years has been the manifestation of Coalgate! Clearly the nuclear ‘tail’ is wagging the energy ‘dog’. The Parliament has been arm-twisted to pass an absurd Nuclear Liability Law, limiting the manufacturer’s liability to Rs1,500 crore and for a period only of five years—a sure invitation to build obsolescence after a 5-year life. Astonishingly, even this weak law is sought to be circumvented by seeking to allow the foreign manufacturer to go totally free of risk. Clearly our policymakers have greater sympathy for the commercial worries of foreign manufacturers, than the concerns of the poor Indian citizen.

If one were to look at nuclear power, we need to seriously consider or at least investigate ‘fourth-generation’ nuclear technology. A number of countries have already started experimentation in this regard; prototypes and model plants are already in the process of establishment. Clearly our policymakers are totally oblivious to these developments. Note that the ‘fourth-generation’ technology has the potential to be much less expensive, completely safe and not weaponizable. It meets nearly every possible objection to third-generation technology. Is it merely ignorance or deliberate sell-out that we have not even allowed a public debate on this subject, as if this potential technology is unknown to the world?

India has vast thorium reserves, probably the largest in the world. We have accepted unquestioningly the western research opinion that thorium cannot be the feed-stock for nuclear energy. Recent developments in fourth-generation nuclear technology suggest that thorium can become the source for energy in this field and a breakthrough may not be far away. In this context, it is baffling that the government has not embarked on sponsoring large-scale research on use of thorium for this purpose. It is even more astonishing that thorium is allowed to be smuggled out of the country, allegedly in very large quantities, right under the nose of our authorities, who do not know what is happening in their mining sectors. Recent reports (summer 2013) from Tamil Nadu indicate large-scale mining of thorium-rich sand and its exports. Clearly somebody outside the country has understood the potential while we do not even realize that it is being smuggled out.

In short, our energy policy, as our approach to nearly every other major issue confronting the nation, is vapid, vacuous, irrational, illogical, non-existent and heavily influenced by outside interests. A country which cannot produce enough power to meet its needs has no business flaunting itself as a potential leader or performer in the comity of nations. Among many things we need to be ashamed of, this would lead the list!

Registered motor vehicles have grown in the past decade at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 per cent while surfaced roads in metropolitan areas have grown at an annual rate of less than 1 per cent. This mismatch, and its potential consequences over a 10-year period, will be obvious to a high school math student. Apparently, however, the implications are beyond the comprehension of our management systems. In many urban arterial roads, ‘peak hour’ is round the clock while in others, during morning and evening hours, passage is tortuous and prolonged. One surmises that urban commuters reached their destination faster four decades back; at the differential rates of growth between road availability and increase in vehicular traffic, the days of logjam are not far away.

The roads in residential colonies appear to be primarily meant for parking vehicles. Pedestrians take their lives in their hands when they take their morning constitutional walk. High-powered cars drive at breakneck speed, causing terror and damage. In many upper-middle class colonies, it is not unusual to see three or four cars, often Mercs and BMWs, parked in front of a house. The value on wheels per household can be as high as a crore of rupees or more. The owner prefers to use the public road as a garage. Why should a parking fee of say

10,000 per month not be charged by the municipality or the RWA for each vehicle? Why should cars parked for long periods on the main roads in bazaar areas not pay a heavy charge? Why should public passageway be used for private parking? In cities like New York, parking rates for just eight hours can go up to $200. In many countries in Europe one needs to purchase a ‘local shelter’, bought through the manufacturer when you purchase the vehicle, or pay each time of parking. Why should this facility be free in India? Parking wars and road-rage are inevitably on the increase.

In cities like Singapore, London and many others, a heavy ‘per entry’ tax is levied in designated areas. In many cities, purely residential colonies have been converted to highways, in the sense that traffic enters the smallest bye-lane to take ‘short-cuts’ adding to the misery of harassed pedestrians and ordinary residents.

Expansion in urban infrastructure is the key element in the planning of most cities in the world. Even towns likes Barcelona, Taegu (Taegu?—where is it?) had metros 60 years back. South Mumbai’s sea connectivity with the mainland ought to have been completed 50 years back—one hears with dismay that ‘technical objections’ have surfaced against a new plan in this regard .

The Kolkata metro took 40 years to build; the Delhi Metro, early last decade, did the job in five years. Delhi should have had its metro three decades earlier. It is heartening to hear that 25 cities in India are in the process of creating their metro rail systems. In each case the construction period is inordinately long with much harassment to the citizenry. By the time the new systems are ready, traffic growth will have outstripped supply, as in the case of Delhi. The key to planned growth is having infrastructure created ahead of demand. Why are we permanently playing ‘catch-up’? It is the same story in power supply. Primacy ought to be given to multi-modal public transport, as opposed to private transport.

Why is there no bold aggressive plan to have elevated urban highways, vaulting over colonies to ease congestion in the arteries and to provide a quick transportation mode for vehicular traffic? This has been successfully tried in Delhi with the Barapullah flyover—a wonderful experiment, marred only by lack of imagination in not providing direct connectivity to the main destination of NOIDA, prompting a wag to comment: ‘We always knew they were corrupt, but clearly they are also stupid!’ We need hundreds of Barapullahs in our cities over the next five years, though more imaginatively planned and designed.

Many readers will not like the suggestion that cars are heavily under-priced and under-taxed in India. For example, a Honda Civic in Singapore costs about

1 one crore. Indian roads are not built for Ferraris, BMWs and SUVs so why are they not taxed at, say, 500 per cent? The less said about the standards of policing, and optimal management of urban roads the better. The only training that the traffic police get apparently is in quietly pocketing the regular bakshish or hafta, or fleecing the rule violator; they have no concern for the smooth movement of traffic. Senior police officers in-charge of traffic in most urban areas appear to be chosen carefully from among the most unimaginative and non-serious among those available. The quality of supervision of our traffic is abysmal. Apparently there is no ‘vote bank’ in organizing smooth traffic; but there is much profit to be made in creating bottlenecks! The disdain for our rural areas is only matched by the neglect of our urban areas .

Again for regular international travellers, it is an important issue as to whether you drive on the left side or the right side of the road. Those who take their cars from London to Paris through the ‘Chunnel’ have to switch from the left-side of the road to the right side once they reach France. In the US and Europe, it is right hand drive. In Japan, Emirates and in many other countries of the old British Empire, it is left hand drive. Foreign visitors to India need to know that in India, it is ‘officially’ left hand drive, but right-hand drive is not unusual, certainly not forbidden. Thus, whenever there is a level crossing without a divider, traffic builds up on either side to cover the entire road. On a two-lane each way highway, about ten lanes get created on either side. Motorcycles and smaller vehicles fill up all available space in all directions. On the NOIDA-Greater NOIDA Highway, where vehicles often drive at more than 120 km per hour, it is not unusual to see vehicles coming on the wrong lane, at considerable speed, ostensibly taking the democratic position that the road belongs as much to them as it does to anyone else. No wonder the vehicle-mile accident ratio in India is among the highest in the world by a big margin.

It is not just a question of availability of roads, urban or rural; it is equally important as to whether the existing road infrastructure is optimally utilized. When one drives in small and medium size towns anywhere in India, the main streets are nearly always jam-packed. There is continuous one-upmanship, with everyone trying to cut through in whichever direction. The person who manages to get away feels that he has climbed Mt. Everest, never mind the chaos and log-jam left behind him, indeed probably caused by him. One car, or one cart or truck ‘strategically’ placed, can hold up traffic for hours. The police in that area watch nonchalantly, the jam is not their problem so they are not concerned. While on the main roads in cities, you should not allow even an inch of space between your car and the vehicle in front of you as someone cuts in promptly and feel he has achieved a victory. Besides, leaving space in front will be seen as ‘weakness’—your macho will not permit it. Never mind if there is a bumper scrape; this provides an opportunity for exchange of abuses, even the occasional fisticuffs and entertainment for the large crowds that gather in a jiffy. Never mind polite exchange of telephone numbers or insurance policy details; if a mild person gets away without physical damage post the accident, he can thank his stars. At any rate, traffic has to be bumper-to-bumper. Shopkeepers and onlookers have a good chance for regular entertainment, following ‘a verbal duel’ or a ‘pugilistic drama’, where they can have a ring-side seat.

As an aside, when one is entering into or waiting to alight from a plane, or standing in any queue, one feels cramped, with bodies pressing into you particularly from behind. Perhaps this may be enjoyable if it is of the right sex, with the right perfume but almost always the person has a tendency to perspire and probably has never heard of deodorants, and to make it worse usually also has bad breath! One can imagine the plight of those who were in the ‘Black Hole of Kolkata’, or in one of those ‘slave-ships’ from the West African coast to the Caribbean. Again leaving the airport pushing the baggage trolley, one strongly has to watch out for a bump into one’s Achilles heels by the trolley behind—a frequent occurrence, even if one takes great care—it can be a very painful experience. When you glare at the culprit, he may or may not look contrite, but will almost always say, generously, ‘never mind’, essentially telling the victim not to get too excited. Clearly he has more concern for your blood pressure, if not your ankle!

Once in Switzerland, driving through to the Austrian border, I got caught in a traffic jam, on the two-lane auto-route due to an accident inside a tunnel. Even though the emergency lane was completely free on our right, not one car overtook me. Lane discipline was maintained for the full three-hours of the jam. I once saw an aerial picture of a 60-mile long, 11-day traffic jam somewhere in China over six-lanes on the highway, due to collapse of a bridge. The aerial picture showed, on the third day, not a single car out of line, no attempt to lane-jump, remarkable discipline. If we can see this in one ‘developing’ country (China), it is a mystery why similar discipline cannot be displayed or enforced in India. Again, many years back, at Victoria Railway Station in London, on a heavy rainy day, I saw a long queue just outside the station on the portico, waiting for taxis. Due to the inclement weather taxis were in heavy demand but no one tried to queue-jump. Even the old people did not ask for preference; nobody ran out of the station to intercept arriving empty taxis; everyone bore the situation with fortitude and patience, waiting for his turn. I wonder why our psychologists have not tried to analyse this issue in the Indian context to identify the underlying tendency for indiscipline in India and suggest measures to be adopted to enforce better discipline.

Perhaps one answer lies in enforcing traffic rules and regulations. I recall that in Switzerland in the 1980s, the bus fare was SF 1, per trip. In general, one purchases a ticket at the automatic ticket booth in front of bus stop or buys the monthly concession ticket pass, say for 50 trips and has the ticket punched for each trip. There is no one to verify if a passenger in the bus has purchased a ticket or has freshly punched his pass prior to entry; in the normal course it appears to be left to one’s ‘honour’ not to travel free—but is that really so? In reality, every now and then suddenly the two doors of the bus, one in the front and one in the back, are closed; two inspectors quickly check each ticket or pass. A defaulter is fined 120 francs on the spot. If he does not have the money, at the next stop the Marshall is called and the defaulter is taken to jail to spend the night there and stay there till somebody pays the fine on his behalf. In effect, the verification of validity of the ticket has a 1:30 chance; the penalty is 1:120. Only a very foolish person will take a chance. The principle involved is simple—trust the citizen, however, verify him in a thorough manner periodically. In case he is found to be a defaulter, punish him in a disproportionately high manner; there will be no escape clause or excuses under any circumstances. These are the principles that will ensure that rules are obeyed. It should not be difficult to bring these into practice in Indian conditions—there is just no desire to do so.

In the US, for example, anybody caught and convicted for drunken driving has to forfeit his driving license. This caution is clearly inscribed in the license itself. The systems are managed in such a manner that effective random checks are effected periodically, the ‘drink-test’ is administered in a thorough manner that will stand scrutiny in court and special courts take up cases within weeks. These kinds of measures have practically eliminated drunk-driving in the US. In Singapore, drivers who have caused death through drunk-driving, are liable for execution. Such severe measures are required in our system to counter the present general impression that one can violate the law with impunity. For example, Salman Khan the actor is under trial for ‘drunk-driving’. It is a joke of sorts that the trial, with legal shenanigans has been going on for nearly a decade now.

I was asked by one of the local engineering colleges near Karur, a tehsil town in my childhood, now a district headquarter, to be the guest of honour and address the students. This was in April 2013. Despite the inconvenience of the travel just for one lecture, I readily accepted the invite, mainly because my home village is located very close to the town, across River Amaravati, which forms the boundary of the town. The road from Tiruchy, where my plane landed winds alongside River Kaveri, all the way to Karur, about 80 km away. Amaravati, a tributary, merges into the Kaveri, a few miles short of Karur on the route.

During my childhood, I spent nearly every summer holiday in our ancestral home in the village, basically a one-street Brahmin village those days, but now with its character much different. My grandfather who settled down in the village after a career as a revenue official, rising to the level of tehsildar by the time he retired, was perhaps the most prominent and respected citizen in the village. As I mentioned, the village was next to River Amaravati, and between the village and the river, there was a small irrigation canal. My grandfather’s memoirs, written early in the 20th century in English, are likely to be published soon, giving a graphic picture of life in a typical village in early last century, also with references to government service during the British period, as seen by a junior official. He refers to going to town—Karur—nearly every day, crossing the canal which we used to call in Tamil Vaikkal which almost always had water flowing at some speed, at least waist high and then crossing Amaravati, usually swimming across the river—there was no proper bridge across the river during his times.

During my summer holidays, the canal always had waist high water, and generally clean, even though the village did its washing in the canal. We waded across the canal, went on to the river, played a ball game in the sand bank and returned to our homes. I never saw the canal having less than waist high water. Amaravati was always a perennial river, though during summer time water flowed only in about a quarter of its width.

On the drive from Tiruchy airport to Karur that afternoon in 2013, I was quite surprised to see that Kaveri river, which always had plenty of water, one of the perennial rivers mentioned in our scriptures, appeared to be completely dry. I had not driven on that route for many years, and asked the driver of my taxi as to why there was no water in the Kaveri. He had come to that area only about five years earlier; he mentioned that he had never seen water in the river except briefly after the rainy season every year. As I reached Karur, drove close to Amaravati, I noted that there was not a single drop of water in the river. On the day I reached Karur, I went to my village to pray at the Ganesha Temple, established by my grandfather, paid a visit to my old home, very familiar to me through at least 15 annual visits where in an outhouse in the mid-1950s, down with chicken-pox and in ‘quarantine’, I had read the ‘complete Shakespeare’ in those seven days when I was out of commission. I had many intimate memories of that house. As I walked to the temple alongside the canal, I was astonished to see not a drop of water in it. In fact it had been converted into a sewer canal, where all the waste water and sewerage was diverted. Uncovered as it was, the canal—surely it has to be called a sewerage ditch now—raised a stink as I approached it. In the course of one day, I had discovered that three water channels, the Kaveri river, the Amaravati river and the village canal, all of which had a 24x7x365 water flow had become totally and probably irrevocably dry. The canal had become an effluent and sewer discharge passage.

In the tehsildar’s house, by a pure coincidence the new owner was also a retired tehsildar, a gentleman by the name Subramanya Bharathi (presumably named after the great freedom poet). He had grown up in a neighbouring house, joined the government service and had risen to retire respectably as tehsildar. He received me warmly, and called his mother who was in the adjoining pooja room to join us. Lost as she was in prayer and meditation amidst the hundred or so pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses, she reluctantly came over to us. When the tehsildar introduced me as a retired Cabinet Secretary, and even mentioned that I had earlier been a Chief Secretary in some state, there was no reaction, this did not register. But when he mentioned that I had been ‘Collector’, there was a visible change in her demeanour—she became highly respectful, looked at me with great admiration, regard, animation and warmth and went out of her way to offer coffee, sweets etc., mentioning how honoured she was that such a great person, that is, a Collector, should take the trouble to visit her. After all everyone will have his own heroes; greatness is in the eyes of the beholder!

On finishing my lecture the next day, I drove straight to the airport at Tiruchy, flew to Chennai, took a connection to Delhi, landing there late the same evening. It was quite dark as I crossed the Yamuna by the DND flyover on my way home. Suddenly a stench hit my nostrils and I asked the driver what it was. He looked surprised, and said to me that it was the foul smell emanating from the Yamuna. Yes, even the Yamuna has now become an effluent discharge canal. So much for our perennial rivers, mentioned in daily prayers:

... ... referring to the perennial rivers of India—Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu and Kaveri; Saraswati has long since disappeared underground, alas literally and figuratively; Sindhu (Indus) has been ceded to Pakistan; in one single day I discovered that Kaveri had become totally dry, and the Yamuna is now a sewage canal. The count is on and it is a question of time before the others also go the same way. Within a month or so thereafter, one learnt that the Mandakini, a tributary of the Ganga got flooded for a brief period, caused untold destruction and desolation and swiftly ran on to the Bay of Bengal, to return to its normal thin stream. I wonder if there is any policy recognition of the criticality of the situation, the impending catastrophe in terms of what the future has to portend in terms of water supply in India. A few years back one heard of a grandiose scheme to connect the major rivers of India—I do not know what the feasibility is. However, the way things are moving now, it may actually amount to creating a national sewage grid—I cannot comment on its desirability .

About a decade back, I had the opportunity to drive across Continental USA, from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean in a leisurely ten-day trip, in semi-holiday mode. After passing through the vast Colorado river mountainous areas, after Nevada, Utah and Colorado states, we drove through the vast plains of Kansas in the night, to reach St. Louis in Mississippi, where we crossed the Missouri river, of Mark Twain Riverboat memory—‘Ole Man River’! Between St. Louis and Washington DC, one crossed at least 15 large rivers, each carrying more water than Ganga, Yamuna, Narmada and Godavari put together. Every 50 miles or so, one crossed a major waterway. Lake Mead and Hoover dam have irrigated California, a naturally barren area converted to a highly fertile fruit belt through imaginative use of the waters of the Colorado river. One sees the Ganga or the Godavari reach the sea with abundant mile-wide water. But by contrast the Colorado river irrigates the desert areas of Utah, Las Vegas and Arizona, apart from California; it becomes a trickle, round the year, as it reaches Mexico—water management is the key. A country’s wealth is measured by the amount of water it has, and by the quality of education of its children. We have seen elsewhere how in India, the world’s best human material is prepared for life on the planet, through abysmal lack of educational opportunity. On the other hand, rivers are all drying up, slowly getting converted to carry the national refuse. This is a matter of great concern. I recall great ancient literature in Tamil referring to ‘wealth of water’, as a sign of prosperity. We need to introspect on what we are slowly getting into.

The water table in NOIDA is visibly going down; Gurgaon has nearly reached panic stages with regard to water; in Bangalore, a cruel water-mafia is emerging, supplying potable water to colonies at robbery rates; the recent drought in Maharashtra has an entire state reeling. Is the looming crisis seen by anybody? Are medium and long term measures under contemplation, under implementation? What about water-harvesting techniques? Are they being optimally employed? Many years back there was the check-dam programme for ground water retention in many areas—has anyone heard of these in recent years? The unchecked digging of bore wells, in urban and rural areas, many coupled with powerful submersible pumps are playing further havoc to the rapidly depleting public water supply. Is any kind of regulation in place, or being contemplated? I have written elsewhere about the havoc caused by reckless construction of irrigation canals, which destroyed natural aquifers, as I saw them 20 years back, when I was the Agriculture Production Commissioner in Uttar Pradesh. Does anyone realize that a major water catastrophe is around the corner? Does the PM or the Planning Commission have any views on the subject? Does Montek realize that if the nation does not start serious thinking now, we could jeopardize our future agriculture potential, as well as even availability of drinking water. Is there a problem? Apart from sterile official notes on files, and indulging in inter-departmental turf wars, is anything else going on that is worthwhile in the Planning Commission? As a citizen I would like to be assured in this regard; and if there is a likely problem, I would like to be assured that preparatory steps are being thought of and being taken.