Editorial 1 : Analysing Maharashtra’s water crisis
Context
After the deficient monsoon last year, the Maharashtra government declared many parts of the State to be drought-hit. The impact of the deficiency manifested across the region this summer as wells ran dry and officials brought tankers to provide drinking water and water for irrigation.
What is the rain-shadow effect?
- Marathwada lies in the rain-shadow region of the Western Ghats. When moist winds from the Arabian Sea encounter these mountains, they rise and cool, causing heavy rainfall (2,000-4,000 mm) on the western side.
- But by the time these winds cross the Ghats and descend into Western Maharashtra and Marathwada, they lose most of their moisture, leaving Marathwada much drier (600-800 mm).
- A 2016 study by IIT Gandhinagar researchers said climate change is worsening the situation in central Maharashtra.
- The region has experienced an increasing trend in drought severity and frequency of late.
- As a result, Marathwada and North Karnataka have emerged as the second driest regions in India after Rajasthan.
How does this affect crops?
- Marathwada’s agricultural practices are not well suited to its low rainfall.
- A major contributor to the region’s water crisis is sugarcane cultivation.
- Sugarcane requires 1,500-2,500 mm of water in its growing season. While pulses and millets require four or five irrigations across their crop life, sugarcane needs to be irrigated almost every day.
- The area under sugarcane increased steadily between the 1950s and the 2000s, plateauing in the last decade.
- Today, the crop occupies 4% of the total cropped area in the region and consumes 61% of the irrigation water.
- As a result, the average river outflow in the upper Bhima basin has almost halved.
- Long-standing government support for sugarcane pricing and sales has expanded sugarcane irrigation, restricting the irrigation of more nutritious crops.
- Since December 2023, the government has been promoting sugarcane-juice-based ethanol production, which may be unwise for this water-starved area: 82% of the sugar grown in Maharashtra comes from low-rainfall areas.
- The Maharashtra Water and Irrigation Commission in 1999 recommended that sugarcane should be banned in areas that receive less than 1,000 mm of rainfall a year, yet production has increased.
How do soil, topography matter?
- Marathwada has predominantly clayey black soil, locally called “regur”. It is fertile and retains moisture well.
- However, it has a low infiltration rate: when it rains, the water is either logged or runs off, but doesn’t percolate down to recharge groundwater.
- To capture this high run-off, Maharashtra has been building many dams — such that it is today the State with the most large dams in the country (1,845).
- The soil also has low hydraulic conductivity and holds on to the water for a long time after rains.
- Even within Marathwada, water scarcity is not uniform. The area has parallel tributaries of the Godavari and the Krishna flowing southeast.
- Each tributary flows in the valley and is separated by a gently sloping hill. The valleys have perennial groundwater while the uplands have seasonal groundwater.
- This is because groundwater slowly moves underground from upland areas to the valleys.
- The wells in upland areas dry up a few months after the monsoons, and is where the water scarcity is most acute. They are at a natural disadvantage and deserve special support.
Solutions
- Supply-side solutions are about making the most of available resources.
- They include classical watershed management work (such as building water-conserving structures like contour trenches, earthen bunds, gully plugs, etc.).
- Second, rainwater that runs off agricultural fields carries the very soil that doesn’t allow the water to percolate. So many of these structures accumulate silt.
- Funds under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme could be used to design silt-trapping mechanisms and organise training programmes for farmers on periodic desilting.
Way forward
- In a low-rainfall region, managing water demand includes practising water-efficient irrigation, cultivating drought-resistant crops, and diversifying livelihoods.
- Marathwada must also shift to other high-value, low-water-using crops, while sugarcane production must move to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.
Editorial 2 : India needs the anchor of a national security strategy
Context
The new National Democratic Alliance government faces some thorny old problems in national security. It will have to make decisions — or else continue to defer them — on everything from whether to build another aircraft carrier, to the process of implementing theaterisation, to managing strategic relations with the United States and competition with China.
Many strategic risks
- India cannot afford to be so reactive. The world is throwing up a slew of strategic risks, from climate change to pandemics, which require decades of coordinated policy effort to address.
- China alone represents an unprecedented array of interconnected challenges, from an explosive naval build-up, to geoeconomic clout in South Asia, to leverage in global supply chains.
- And even distant conflicts, from Ukraine to Gaza, are revealing new technologies and tactics of war that will invariably spread to India’s neighbourhood.
- India needs a regular process to make sense of this tumult and plan for it.
A blueprint for expanding power
- A regular and well-crafted NSS would give India five critical benefits that it currently lacks.
- First and logically foremost, it would force the government to undertake a comprehensive strategic assessment — a review of the country’s threats and opportunities, and a stocktake of global security trends.
- In the absence of an NSS, long-term threats will be neglected until they pose an immediate and grave threat — when they will be much harder to manage.
- Second, an NSS would provide a coherent framework for long-term planning. Strategic competition requires intense work in peacetime, to conceptualise how best to secure India’s expanding interests and deter its adversaries, and then to develop the requisite military capabilities and international partnerships.
- Third, an NSS would provide an instrument for signalling to friend and foe alike. It would help to clarify India’s strategic intent — declaring that, for example, India takes seriously its role as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean, so that it will counter armed coercion against other, smaller countries.
- Fourth, an NSS would create a mechanism to force various arms of the government to synchronise their efforts.
- Within the military, an NSS would give the Integrated Defence Staff and future joint organisations a clearer top-down mandate to better align the work of the Indian Army, Indian Air Force, and Indian Navy.
- Beyond the military, an NSS would provide common goals and plans so that various national security agencies, including the Ministries of Defence, External Affairs, and Home Affairs, and the intelligence agencies, could better coordinate daily at the working level, rather than episodically at the Cabinet level.
Issue of accountability
- Finally, an NSS would introduce a novel accountability tool, to ensure that the bureaucracy adheres to the political leadership’s intent, and that the government’s policies are as transparent as possible to Parliament and the people.
- The citizens of India have a legitimate need to know how their government is planning to safeguard their national security, and how well it is performing.
- A fully effective strategy should be a public document issued with the imprimatur of the Prime Minister, because its purpose is to synchronise efforts widely across government, and credibly signal the government’s political intent throughout the country and the world.
Conclusion
A strong NSS would not automatically resolve conflicts between various arms of the government, but it should at least identify trade-offs and opportunity costs, so that political leaders can make rational decisions for long-term growth.
