Many projects but no water

Drinking water is becoming scarcer by the day in Madhya Pradesh, despite a slew of water development projects with help from the Central government, the ADB and the Japanese government

By N D Sharma

Madhya Pradesh came into existence in 1956. In civic terms, it really hasn’t improved much since then. Reports say that currently the administration and the local bodies are supplying drinking water for no more than a few minutes on alternate days in 98 cities and towns; in another 36 urban conglomerates, water is supplied on the third, fourth, fifth or sixth days. As for those living in villages and hamlets, forget about them: newspapers occasionally publish photographs of villagers scooping out water from shallow, muddy ponds.

Digvijay Singh, perhaps the biggest demagogue the state has produced after Arjun Singh, had promised in the Congress party’s election manifesto for the 1993 Assembly elections the provision of clean drinking water in each village within five years. He remembered his promise—but only five years later, when the party manifesto for the 1998 Assembly elections was being drafted. The people tolerated him for another five years, and gave him the bum’s rush in 2003.

In came the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the three and a half years the party has been in power, it has not taken a single step to redress the miseries of the people (unless they belong to the Sangh Parivar). The party is always toying with obscure, and obscurantist, ideas. As chief minister, Uma Bharati had coined the slogan “Panch-Ja” and formed high-level committees for its implementation. Even today, no one knows quite what “Panch-Ja” means.

Babulal Gaur came with the slogan “Gokul Gram”, a fairly opaque concept of village development. The current chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, has taken the path away from rural development: he has invited Britain’s biggest Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), with assets worth £ 8 billion (nearly Rs 75,000 crore), to begin its operations in Madhya Pradesh.

In terms of drinking water, hundreds of crores of rupees have been appropriated by the state’s politicians and bureaucrats. Bhopal’s Upper Lake (Bada Talao), which has considerably shrunk due to the encroachments over the years, is the city’s main source of drinking water supply. All the sewers flow into either the Upper Lake or the Lower Lake (Chhota Talao). Japan provided a loan of Rs 247 crore in 1995 to divert the sewers from the two lakes, andfor their de-weeding and de-silting. The project, known as ‘Bhojwetland’, was completed some years ago, but 27 sewers
are still debouching into the Upper Lake and 28 sewers into the Lower Lake.

Three years ago, the Madhya Pradesh state government had procured a loan of Rs 179 crore from the Asian Development Bank for “streamlining” the drinking water supply in Bhopal. Not surprisingly, the drinking water supply in the state capital this year is far worse than it was last year. With its usual fascination for giving Sanskrit names to its projects, the BJP government launched, a while back, “Project Uday” to ensure clean the drinking water supply to the four cities of Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur and Gwalior. A middle-rung Indian Administrative Services officer has been put in charge of the project, and a sum of Rs 1,366 crore, obtained from state, Central and foreign agencies, has been put at his disposal.

The outcome, given the past of such projects, is anybody’s guess.