Water is where state’s heart is

Irrigation in this state is the key to its politics. This has been understood well by leaders like Sharad Pawar, president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

In 1972, when there was severe drought situation, Pawar, then a young politician, built a percolation tank with the help of the Food for Work program. This act, besides his skills and abilities, eventually catapulted him to the centre stage of state politics.

At that time, only 12% of the land in the state was irrigated. The state Congress leadership wanted to change this, and tried to irrigate more land. Late Shankarrao Chavan, a great visionary politician, had a studied plan for irrigation in his own region—Marathwada. It helped bring money to the area and aided the implementation of irrigation projects such as Jayakwadi, Manar, Vishnupuri, Terna and Darna. No wonder then that he was considered an arch enemy by leaders from Western Maharashtra.

Neither late Vasatdada Patil liked him, nor did Sharad Pawar have any love for him. On the other hand, the feeling in the minds of leaders from Marathwada was that this is a war over the money generated by the state, which had always been grabbed by the leaders from Western Maharashtra.

Shiv Sena leaders like Manohar Joshi understood this rift in the Congress and tried to take advantage of it. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Sena were in power, it devised a grand plan for the utilisation of water from the Krishna River in the light of the Krishna River Tribunal judgment, which had earmarked 2000 as the deadline.

But there was more to the plan than development. Though the water would have benefited the people of the region, it would also have destabilised the political equations in Western Maharashtra, a Congress bastion. However, the move fell flat. Though projects pending for ages such as Takari-Mhaisal, Neera-Deoghar, Chandoli were completed, the BJP-Sena could not garner the support of the farmers of the region, as the projects did not add much to the percentage of irrigated land in the state. Rather, they increased the regional imbalance.

Another failure of the BJP-Sena was its treatment of the Konkan region, including Mumbai, where it had a strong presence. There was a time when Ratnagiri returned all six MLAs of the Shiv Sena and one from the BJP to the assembly. But the irrigation woes of Konkan were not addressed by the combine when it was in power. Gradually, the BJP-Sena support in this region weathered, like it happened everywhere.

The irrigation department is now with the NCP. Not surprisingly, all the irrigation corporations created during the BJP-Sena rule have been made defunct in the last ten years. What makes matters worse is that no one seems bothered about it, as long as the palms of the politicians are kept greased.

The author is a senior journalist