The drying of the Deccan

This panel of 12 images shows the change that takes place in a region of the Deccan. Each image shows what is called a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the region. This is a rolling eight-day series computed daily using imagery from the Terra/MODIS system and viewed using the NASA Worldview website.

The colours (green and brown shades, whitish shades) show us the vegetation health with deep green being better than light green, dark brown being better than light brown. The index is also used to signal where areas are beginning to experience arid and water-scarce conditions.

The region is the west-central Deccan – the Karnataka Plateau – corresponds to the Vijayapur (Bijapur) district of north Karnataka with parts of Bagalkot district and is part of the central Indian semi-arid bioclimatic zone.

The pictures in the panel show the vegetation extent and health (NDVI) calculated on that day for an eight-day period. Each picture is a fortnight apart, and this series starts on 4 November 2016 (bottom right) and ends on 7 April 2017 (top left). The retreat of the green is seen clearly from one fortnight to the next.

Of interest in this region is the Almatti dam and reservoir, in the Krishna river basin, which is visible in the lower centre of each picture. On 13 April there was no water in Almatti, which has a full capacity of 3.105 billion cubic metres (bcm). For the week ending 30 March it had 0.015 bcm of water, the week ending 6 April 0.001 bcm.

For the week ending 3 November 2016, which is when the panel of pictures begins, Almatti had 2.588 bcm of water. The reservoir water runs a hydroelectric power plant, of 240 MW, and which needs flowing water to turn the turbines.

When the reservoir is full, the hydel plant produces about 175 million units of electricity. But on 13 March the Central Electricity Authority’s daily report showed that Almatti could produce only 3.02 million units. On 10 April, this had plunged to 0.04 million units, but the hydel plant had produced no power since 1 April.

Seeing the growers of our food and where they are

Where the food that we eat is grown, who the growers of our food are, these are the sort of questions that independent Bharat ought very early to have made central to our understanding of the growing of food crops and the uses to which harvested food crops are put. Instead, we have an administrative understanding, weighed down completely by the bits and pieces of method left by an imperial British administration – whose interests were exploitative and fully colonial.

And assisting this anachronistic administrative view of food and agriculture is a more recent ‘market’ view. This is even more distanced from the farming household and the consuming household than the colonial view was, because its engine is constructed according to the blueprints drawn by a western macro-economics which has served neither the populations of the western countries nor the post-colonial populations of former colonies. The ‘market’ view survives till today only because of the continuous creation of new consumers for food ‘products’ – which is quite different from the seasonal consumption of raw food staples provided by local cultivators.

For these and allied reasons the ability of the central government administration of Bharat – from the time of the First Five Year Plan of 1951-56 – to consider agriculture and food as something other than a ‘sector’, a contributor to gross domestic product (GDP), as an activity through which employment could be supported and poverty kept at bay, has been crippled. There is no reason for it to continue being crippled today. It has continued only because of the legions of planners, advisers, economists and econometricians, academics and researchers, bankers and financiers, and to which assembly must now be added the social entrepreneurs, fin-tech (finance technology) start-ups, and ‘innovators’ who derive dubious means and transient currency out of it.

For this reason I have in a number of articles, papers and writings such as this one sought to describe ways in which the circumstances of the food grower should be, and must be, seen – very often by using the public data and statistics freely available. Some of the indicators we need to have in the foreground – and these are very much more important than the area-produce-yield obsession of our agricultural science establishment and economics planners – are: how many rural households does it take to feed an urban household? Where are farmers, food growers and cultivators a large part of those who work? What role do the smallest urban settlements (census towns) have in the growing and consuming of food?

This is the result of a very small attempt, using Census 2011, to answer such questions.

1. There are 152 districts in which the ratio of the number of rural households to urban households is 8 and above. This means that in 152 districts, rural households outnumber urban households by a factor of at least 8. In 102 of these districts, the ratio is 10 and above, in 45 of these districts the ratio is 15 and above, and in 24 districts the ratio is at least 20.

Among districts which have a high ratio are Ramban in Jammu and Kashmir has a ratio of 24.7 to 1, Sheohar in Bihar has a ratio of 24.6 to 1, West District of Sikkim has a ratio of 23.7 to 1, Anjaw in Arunachal Pradesh has a ratio of 23.7 to 1, Bhabua in Bihar has a ratio of 23.6 to 1 and Baudh in Odisha has a ratio of 22.5 to 1. Whereas Bhabua has some 2.4 lakh rural households, West District has only about 27,000 rural households.

2. There are 174 districts in which the rural farming population, that is, the number of working adults who are engaged in cultivation of their plots or as agricultural labour, is 80% and more of the total rural working population of that district. In 90 of these districts the percentage is 85% and above, in 25 districts it is 90% and above.

Among districts which have a high percentage of cultivators and agricultural labour in their rural working population are Washim and Nandurbar in Maharashtra (90.7% and 90.5%), Dhar, Khandwa and Khargone in Madhya Pradesh (90.6%, 90.5% and 90.5%), and Jashpur and Surguja in Chhattisgarh (both 90.4%).

3. There are 211 districts in which the number of rural households is 3 lakh and above. Of these in 161 districts the number of rural households is 3.5 lakh and above, and in 129 districts the number of rural households is 4 lakh and above. From among these 129, there are 29 in Uttar Pradesh, 19 in Bihar, 15 in West Bengal, 15 in Maharashtra and 13 in Andhra Pradesh.

Among districts with large numbers of rural households are Krishna in Andhra Pradesh with about 7.53 lakh households, Mahbubnagar in Telengana with 7.43 lakh households, Ahmednagar in Maharashtra with 7.39 lakh households, Malda in West Bengal with 7.34 lakh households, Darbhanga in Bihar with 7.29 lakh households, Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh with 7.21 lakh households and Belgaum in Karnataka with 7.19 lakh households.

4. There are 202 districts in which the farming population both rural and urban, that is, the number of working adults who are engaged in cultivation of their plots or as agricultural labour, is 70% or more of the total working population of that district. In 116 of these districts the percentage is 75% and above, in 58 of these districts it is 80% and above.

Among districts with a high combined percentage of rural and urban households engaged in agriculture are Pratapgarh in Rajasthan (83.8%), Mahasamund in Chhattisgarh (83.6%), Mandla in Madhya Pradesh (83.6%), Katihar in Bihar (83%), Khunti in Jharkhand (83%), Uttar Bastar Kanker in Chhattisgarh (83%), Malkangiri in Odisha (82.9%) and Dohad in Gujarat (82.8%).