Maharashtra water woes: Will Fadnavis discourage sugarcane politics?

Mumbai: Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has announced an ambitious Rs34,500 crore programme to 5 million hectares of additional land in the state under irrigation over the next five years. The announcement came during his reply to an assembly discussion on the drought situation in the state last week.

He also announced plans to achieve this goal. His government intends to shift the focus of state’s irrigation sector from large- and medium-scale dams to village-level water shed management programmes, construction of small check dams and creation of farm ponds among others, a strategy successfully adopted by the Madhya Pradesh.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Madhya Pradesh increased the area under irrigation from around 400,000 hectares to 2.4 million hectares in the last decade and this has helped Madhya Pradesh to record more than 15% growth rate in agriculture sector for the last three-four years.

It’s definitely a laudable goal, and if the Fadnavis government manages to achieve his stated goal even by half, it will revolutionize Maharashtra’s agriculture.

Apart from bringing more land under irrigation, if Fadnavis wants to make agricultural activity in Maharashtra more sustainable and distribute water equitably, then he will have to reduce Maharashtra’s overdependence on sugarcane, which is one of the most water-intensive crops.

The area under cultivation for sugarcane is only around 16% of the total cultivable land in the state, according to a 2005 World Bank report, but sugarcane consumes around 70% of the total water available through the irrigation system for farming in the state.

One can import sugar from Brazil, Mauritius or for that matter any other tropical country with assured rain, but one can’t import water from these countries to sustain agriculture here. Unlike these countries, more than one-third of Maharashtra that includes eastern parts of western Maharashtra and northern Maharashtra and entire Marathwada region (central Maharashtra) are drought-prone.

In any block of five years, two-three years are of below-average rainfall and the situation becomes worse if these two or three years happen to be consecutive. The farmers in Marathwada are suffering from the same problem—this is the third straight drought year in that region.

Instead of encouraging cultivation of pulses and oilseeds other than food crops and promoting research and development activity for these crops, which would have helped farmers to increase their productivity since independence, politicians from Maharashtra promoted sugarcane, which helped create their power bases and entrenched their families forever.

The model developed by these politicians to create power bases for themselves was simple: construct a large- or medium-size dam at the foothills of Sahyadri mountain ranges, where rainfall is very high, and then build canals for 200-300km and encourage sugarcane farming in areas irrigated by canals. The average rainfall in Sahyandri mountains is between 300 to 500cm/year, the second highest in the country after the northeast.

They then built cooperative sugar mills. Constructing sugar mills in the cooperative sector was also made easy by the government in 1960s. If a farmers’ cooperative society raises 10% of amount of project cost as an equity, then rest of capital was guaranteed by government. The government used to contribute another 32% of project cost as its equity in the project and rest of the amount came from banks as a loan guaranteed by the state government. And it is needless to say more often than not, politicians promoted and controlled these so-called farmers’ cooperatives.

Maharashtra politics, which revolved around sugar cooperatives, created mini dynasties in districts and regions that dominated local politics and wielded influence at state levels such as Vikhe-Patil, Mohite-Patil, Pawars, Kolhe, Kale, and Kore, among others.

As the whole edifice of the Congress party and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) politics was built around politics of sugar cooperatives, they hardly had any interest in encouraging farmers to shift to other crops but that is not the case with the BJP-Shiv Sena government.

The ruling BJP-Shiv Sena are largely urban parties and their legislators who get elected from rural and semi-urban areas do not come from these established families of the Congress politicians but they are sort of rebels against hegemony of these families over local politics.

So for the BJP-Shiv Sena, it also makes good politics to encourage farmers to shift from sugarcane to other crops and help these parties to establish their base in rural Maharashtra.

As a starting point, the present government can make drip irrigation mandatory for sugarcane farming and revoke the licence of sugar cooperatives which fail to install drip irrigation in their exclusive zone. Each sugar factory, irrespective of whether it is in private sector or cooperative sector, is given exclusive rights to buy sugarcane in a 15km radius of their factory and this is called zoning in sugar industry.

Another step that the state government can take to discourage sugarcane farming in the state is to implement Maharashtra Water Resource Regulatory Authority’s 2011’s recommendation to ensure that the total acreage under sugarcane cultivation doesn’t exceed 10% of command area of a particular dam.

The area irrigated by a particular dam is called command area of that dam.

But the question is, will the Fadnavis government show the courage to take on these entrenched interests, if not for equitable water distribution and sustainable agricultural growth in the state but at least for expansion of their own political base in rural Maharashtra?