Death of the promised land
The word we use for these in Himachal Pradesh is chirmi,’ says Baldev Singh, holding up a palmful of white flowers, giving them a sniff, and then handing them to me. ‘And this is bana, we use this one for the betterment of cattle. And look, bamboo.’
Baldev has grown this oasis of Himalayan plants to remind him of the hill country around Dharamsala that was his home until 1977, when his farm was sunk beneath a giant new reservoir. In his early 20s at the time, he was resettled here on the arid, heavily militarised borderland between Rajasthan and Pakistan.
Being dumped in a 40-hectare swath of dune-filled desert must have seemed a raw deal, but there was one consolation: running through the sandy soil was a trench that tapped directly into the newly built Indira Gandhi Canal. The area, near the then tiny village of Gharsana in the Ganganagar district, was to receive water from Pong Lake, the same reservoir that had, just months before, submerged Baldev’s mountain home 600 kilometres away.
The searing heat took some getting used to, but as the water gushed in, Baldev began wondering if he really was so unfortunate. ‘The very first harvest I brought in, in the very first year, was seven times what I used to have in Himachal,’ he says. ‘Then I felt happy.’ He channelled the profits back into the farm, bought 200 more hectares of land and two tractors and, a decade ago, was elected village leader.
His wife, Ram Pyari, has the deep-set eyes of India’s mountain people, but Baldev, his skin darkened by the sun, now looks a true Rajasthani – right down to the pointed-toed juti shoes he bought a few months ago in the desert town of Pokhran. ‘I have prospered here,’ he says proudly, ‘just like these Himachali plants have prospered here.’
This year, however, Baldev’s prosperity may have come to an end. Outside his pond-fed garden, there is no water to speak of. ‘That was cotton,’ he says, waving at a large flat field, ‘but there’s no cotton on those plants. It’s all burned out by lack of water and this scorching heat. This year, I have zero crops. Nothing.’
As the warming global climate alters weather patterns both here and over the hills that feed India’s canals, this fertile strip, sandwiched between the harsh Thar Desert and Punjab, India’s breadbasket state, is facing a water crisis worse than almost anywhere in India. The monsoon provided only a few scant hours of rain this year, Baldev complains, and temperatures in September were a sweltering 8°C above normal. But most disastrous of all, water has flowed through the canal just twice, and that was designated ‘drinking water only’ by the irrigation authorities. Baldev could siphon off a little for his cattle and his garden, but his crops got nothing.
Last year, India had its weakest monsoon since 1972, and Jagdeep Sarswat, a grain trader in the local market, expects agricultural production here to fall to a fifth of what it was the year before. And the winter crop promises to be little better. Even after the monsoon, the Pong reservoir is just 46 per cent full, and the committee that doles out the water has slashed the amount going into the Indira Gandhi Canal over the coming eight months from 3.7 trillion litres to just two trillion litres. Half of that will go for drinking water, while the rest has been reserved for drought-resistant crops such as guar and mustard.
‘This is a real crisis for Rajasthan,’ says Kuldeep Bishnoi, executive engineer at the Indira Gandhi Canal. ‘Even in a good year, rainfall here is 250 millilitres. No-one here can survive without irrigation.’
Canal revolution
Twenty years ago, Gharsana was the fastest-growing village in Asia, or so locals proudly claim, a case study for how dam irrigation could make the desert bloom. People flooded in as quickly as the new canal could provide water for them, and the region’s population density soared from a sparse 10–20 people per square kilometre to around 200.
New villages sprang up all over the place, their names reflecting the Soviet influence of the day in the form of the irrigation department’s shorthand for local canal infrastructure. Baldev’s village is 8SKMA, there’s a 9SKMA, a DD7, and the notoriously fractious 5MLD.
The landless poor in Punjab and Haryana received six-hectare plots, richer farmers from those same states swapped their ancestral lands for larger landholdings on the new agricultural frontier, and the area’s original inhabitants suddenly found themselves in possession of rich farmland. ‘When my forefathers were residing in Dabber before the erection of the canal, they had only rain-fed land,’ recalls Manohan Lal, who now lives in DD7 (Dabber Distributary No 7). ‘And when there was no rain, they survived only by roaming with their cattle, living like nomads.’
The Indira Gandhi Canal, which had been 20 years in the making, was indeed one of the greatest engineering feats of post-independence India: 650 kilometres of main canals, 659 kilometres of branch canals, 5,780 kilometres of distributaries and an enormous 60,000 kilometres of field canals. Taken together, they would stretch around the world one and a half times. At its start, the canal can carry more than half a million litres of water a second to its two million recipients in Rajasthan.
But much of Ganganagar’s agricultural success may actually come down to the Saraswati, a mythical river on whose banks the action of India’s ancient epics the Mahabharata and Rigveda take place. Some historians still argue that the legendary river was in Afghanistan, but recent satellite studies have proved beyond doubt that some 6,000 years ago, a vast lost river flowed through Gharsana.
‘A huge amount of river alluvium has been deposited there, 25 kilometres to 35 kilometres in width,’ says Bishnoi. ‘It is a very surprising phenomenon: while it is called part of the Thar Desert, it is some of the most fertile land in the world.’
It took Baldev four years to clear the dunes from the edge of his land, but beneath them, the soil was richer than anything back in Himachal. ‘My father says it was like heaven,’ says Vinay Godar, a local agriculture teacher whose family exchanged 50 hectares of hereditary land in Haryana for 100 hectares near Anupgarh. ‘At the time, there was sugar cane, cotton and paddy. For 15 years, we made a lot of money.’
Creeping desertification
Today, however, the swollen population that was once the mark of the canal’s success has become a terrible burden. There simply isn’t enough water to go around any more, and the Thar – a desert the size of England – is creeping inexorably northwest towards Punjab.
A 2006 simulation by the Indian Institute for Tropical Meteorology, in partnership with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, paints a grim picture of the years to come. In the next 60 years, rainfall in this strip is predicted to drop by close to a third (while falling more heavily on Gujarat and southern Rajasthan). Temperatures will climb by more than five per cent. ‘Ganganagar and the adjoining places in Punjab, in the light of simulation modelling by different institutes for climate change, show definite trends of drying,’ says Dr Amal Kar, principal scientist at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute in the nearby city of Jodhpur.
Already, many of the villages on the road between Gharsana and the city of Ganganagar are encircled by fields of shifting dunes. ‘Time is running short,’ says Kar. ‘The 2020s are going to be the worst period – that’s what the climate models say – and we are not preparing ourselves.’
The 11 trillion litres of irrigation water Rajasthan is supposed to receive each year from the rivers and dams of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab should be enough to make up for its steadily reducing rainfall levels. But for the past ten years, the state has rarely received even half that amount.
What Indira Gandhi’s government didn’t take into account when it shipped in migrants and resettled Baldev and 1,600 other Himachali families, was that the water from the Himalayan hills only reaches Rajasthan once it has passed through Punjab or Haryana. Under the law that regulates the canal, the desert state comes last in the queue, only entitled to receive its irrigation water once Punjab, Delhi and Haryana have received a guaranteed minimum supply. ‘Whenever there is a deficit in the rainfall, Rajasthan is the victim,’ Bishnoi says grimly.
Local uprising
Sant Lekha Singh’s angry growl rises to a hoarse shout as his speech enters its final crescendo. ‘Water is our employment, water is our right,’ the towering Sikh union leader tells the crowd sitting cross-legged before him. ‘If the government does not provide water, then they may provide death … and we will accept it.’
As their leader stokes up the fiery rhetoric, farmers trickle into the corrugated iron hangar where Gharsana’s annual grain harvest is collected, some hugging ornamental Sikh spears as if prepared for battle. With 5,000 farmers taking part, this is the largest water protest Rajasthan has seen since the winter of 2004, when 20,000 farmers from 5MLD rioted, attacking government offices and smashing dam infrastructure to release water onto their parched lands. The police retaliated with gunfire, leaving six farmers dead.
‘This could be 20 times as horrible as 2004,’ threatens Singh. ‘The Congress Party has shown us a picture of death, and a person who has seen a picture of death can do anything.’
None of this disturbs the aura of refined calm emanating from Ashutosh AT Pednekar, the district collector, Ganganagar’s most senior government official, as he sits in his airy office. ‘It’s not a question of a water crisis,’ he asserts in crisp, well-educated English. ‘We are in talks with the farmers and we are making adequate arrangements for whatever contingencies might arrive. I think that should be enough.’
But the irrigation department is prepared for trouble, worried that the unrest will lead to conflict with neighbouring states, further endangering their supplies. ‘There will be more fights between Rajasthan and Punjab, because the law and order problem will get worse,’ Bishnoi predicts. ‘These Marxist leaders are seeking ground in Rajasthan. They know that water is not available in the dams, but even then they are pushing the cultivators to agitation, saying, “You can get more than your fair share”.’
The 2004 protests brought India’s Communists to power in Anupgarh, their first seat in the state, and if the ruling Congress Party wants to stop them spreading further, it will need to beg for its full water supplies from the Punjab government. But that government is led by the Congress Party’s opposition, the Sikh Akali Dal party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Even during the four years when the governments of the two states were allies, Punjab still refused to supply the water that Rajasthan claims has been due since the Indira Gandhi Canal was extended in 2000.
Bishnoi accuses Punjab and Haryana of secretly juggling water between dams and canals to deny Rajasthan as much as three trillion litres of the water it deserves. And then there is Pakistan, over the tense border, which accuses India of breaking the terms of the 1960 treaty under which the two divide up India’s six western Himalayan rivers.
Fifteen years ago, Ismail Serageldin, the Egyptian former World Bank vice president, conjectured that, just as the wars of the last century were fought over oil, the wars of this one would be fought over water. This strip looks set to be one of the battlefields.
Farmed out
Hari Kailash looks helplessly at his withered cotton field, his eyes reddened and his shoulders slumped. The only greenery is a small patch of grass he has grown for his cattle by illegally siphoning off drinking water. ‘Fifteen years ago, we made a lot of money,’ laments Suresh Devi, his mother. ‘We used to have labourers working for us. We had a tractor, and look at this house we built. Now we don’t even have money to buy whitewash for it. It seems we are going to die without food.’
Kailash has given up on receiving water from the canal. He now plans to shut down his farm and move to Punjab or Haryana to work as a temporary labourer. In doing so, he will be following many others in Anupgarh: for the first time since 1927 – when the area’s enlightened maharaja, Ganga Singh, built the Ganga Canal to bring Punjab’s river water to Ganganagar for the first time – the flow of migrants has reversed, with hundreds of thousands crossing the border to Punjab to seek work. Manohar Lal says that more than a third of the farmers in DD7 have already left. Many of them have even put their land up for sale, but there are few buyers.
Pednekar, the collector, is convinced that even with today’s reduced supply of irrigation water, Ganganagar can still support its people. ‘We believe that with the kind of resources that we have right now, if they’re efficiently utilised, this area will really bloom,’ he says.
Some 20 years after the World Bank agreed to provide funds, work is finally going ahead to line stretches of the main Gang Canal with bricks, which, Pednekar says, should increase levels of irrigation in those areas by around 15 per cent. He also talks of expanding the area under drip cultivation, which can provide an 80 per cent water saving, of growing higher value crops such as citrus, and of swapping thirsty crops such as wheat and rice for mustard and lentils.
‘The kind of analogy that we are giving is Israel, which is similar in terms of topography – it’s a desert state, and so is this. It’s not about water availability, it depends on how best you make use of it,’ he says.
And a few years back, he would not have found a more whole-hearted supporter than Vinay Godar. The agriculture teacher took over the family farm from his tenants only five years ago, and embraced all of the most up-to-date thinking on farming arid land. Black plastic piping snakes over the dusty earth of his farm; citrus trees are interspersed with cotton. On the least irrigated areas, some of which are barely distinguishable from the adjacent desert, he’s experimenting with new crops such as pomegranate. ‘Many people used to come here to see my fields because I was doing such new work to fight against the desert,’ he says.
Now he surveys his land with a look that borders on disgust. ‘We sowed this on the rain two months ago,’ he says, pointing to a dusty field of shrivelled crops. ‘Guar seed needs only two rains to get a yield: if it had rained only once, if we had got only one watering from the canal, we would have yielded it. But we didn’t even get that.
‘I know every technique of farming,’ he concludes ruefully. ‘but I do not know how to farm without water.’
Home truths
Godar has his teaching to fall back on. Baldev, who is stuck with his conservative farming methods, complains that even in a good year, he now receives a tenth of the income he did a decade ago. If conditions don’t improve, he may sell up and return to Himachal Pradesh, where his family still has a house.
And in a strange twist, when the water in the Pong reservoir gets really low, Baldev’s old village land begins to re-emerge. He’s seen it a few times during his annual trips home. Some of his former neighbours have even started farming it in the dry season.
‘It’s very fertile,’ he says, with a look of wonder. ‘It’s as if it still holds all of the lake water inside it.’
April 2010
Baldev has grown this oasis of Himalayan plants to remind him of the hill country around Dharamsala that was his home until 1977, when his farm was sunk beneath a giant new reservoir. In his early 20s at the time, he was resettled here on the arid, heavily militarised borderland between Rajasthan and Pakistan.
Being dumped in a 40-hectare swath of dune-filled desert must have seemed a raw deal, but there was one consolation: running through the sandy soil was a trench that tapped directly into the newly built Indira Gandhi Canal. The area, near the then tiny village of Gharsana in the Ganganagar district, was to receive water from Pong Lake, the same reservoir that had, just months before, submerged Baldev’s mountain home 600 kilometres away.
The searing heat took some getting used to, but as the water gushed in, Baldev began wondering if he really was so unfortunate. ‘The very first harvest I brought in, in the very first year, was seven times what I used to have in Himachal,’ he says. ‘Then I felt happy.’ He channelled the profits back into the farm, bought 200 more hectares of land and two tractors and, a decade ago, was elected village leader.
His wife, Ram Pyari, has the deep-set eyes of India’s mountain people, but Baldev, his skin darkened by the sun, now looks a true Rajasthani – right down to the pointed-toed juti shoes he bought a few months ago in the desert town of Pokhran. ‘I have prospered here,’ he says proudly, ‘just like these Himachali plants have prospered here.’
This year, however, Baldev’s prosperity may have come to an end. Outside his pond-fed garden, there is no water to speak of. ‘That was cotton,’ he says, waving at a large flat field, ‘but there’s no cotton on those plants. It’s all burned out by lack of water and this scorching heat. This year, I have zero crops. Nothing.’
As the warming global climate alters weather patterns both here and over the hills that feed India’s canals, this fertile strip, sandwiched between the harsh Thar Desert and Punjab, India’s breadbasket state, is facing a water crisis worse than almost anywhere in India. The monsoon provided only a few scant hours of rain this year, Baldev complains, and temperatures in September were a sweltering 8°C above normal. But most disastrous of all, water has flowed through the canal just twice, and that was designated ‘drinking water only’ by the irrigation authorities. Baldev could siphon off a little for his cattle and his garden, but his crops got nothing.
Last year, India had its weakest monsoon since 1972, and Jagdeep Sarswat, a grain trader in the local market, expects agricultural production here to fall to a fifth of what it was the year before. And the winter crop promises to be little better. Even after the monsoon, the Pong reservoir is just 46 per cent full, and the committee that doles out the water has slashed the amount going into the Indira Gandhi Canal over the coming eight months from 3.7 trillion litres to just two trillion litres. Half of that will go for drinking water, while the rest has been reserved for drought-resistant crops such as guar and mustard.
‘This is a real crisis for Rajasthan,’ says Kuldeep Bishnoi, executive engineer at the Indira Gandhi Canal. ‘Even in a good year, rainfall here is 250 millilitres. No-one here can survive without irrigation.’
Canal revolution
Twenty years ago, Gharsana was the fastest-growing village in Asia, or so locals proudly claim, a case study for how dam irrigation could make the desert bloom. People flooded in as quickly as the new canal could provide water for them, and the region’s population density soared from a sparse 10–20 people per square kilometre to around 200.
New villages sprang up all over the place, their names reflecting the Soviet influence of the day in the form of the irrigation department’s shorthand for local canal infrastructure. Baldev’s village is 8SKMA, there’s a 9SKMA, a DD7, and the notoriously fractious 5MLD.
The landless poor in Punjab and Haryana received six-hectare plots, richer farmers from those same states swapped their ancestral lands for larger landholdings on the new agricultural frontier, and the area’s original inhabitants suddenly found themselves in possession of rich farmland. ‘When my forefathers were residing in Dabber before the erection of the canal, they had only rain-fed land,’ recalls Manohan Lal, who now lives in DD7 (Dabber Distributary No 7). ‘And when there was no rain, they survived only by roaming with their cattle, living like nomads.’
The Indira Gandhi Canal, which had been 20 years in the making, was indeed one of the greatest engineering feats of post-independence India: 650 kilometres of main canals, 659 kilometres of branch canals, 5,780 kilometres of distributaries and an enormous 60,000 kilometres of field canals. Taken together, they would stretch around the world one and a half times. At its start, the canal can carry more than half a million litres of water a second to its two million recipients in Rajasthan.
But much of Ganganagar’s agricultural success may actually come down to the Saraswati, a mythical river on whose banks the action of India’s ancient epics the Mahabharata and Rigveda take place. Some historians still argue that the legendary river was in Afghanistan, but recent satellite studies have proved beyond doubt that some 6,000 years ago, a vast lost river flowed through Gharsana.
‘A huge amount of river alluvium has been deposited there, 25 kilometres to 35 kilometres in width,’ says Bishnoi. ‘It is a very surprising phenomenon: while it is called part of the Thar Desert, it is some of the most fertile land in the world.’
It took Baldev four years to clear the dunes from the edge of his land, but beneath them, the soil was richer than anything back in Himachal. ‘My father says it was like heaven,’ says Vinay Godar, a local agriculture teacher whose family exchanged 50 hectares of hereditary land in Haryana for 100 hectares near Anupgarh. ‘At the time, there was sugar cane, cotton and paddy. For 15 years, we made a lot of money.’
Creeping desertification
Today, however, the swollen population that was once the mark of the canal’s success has become a terrible burden. There simply isn’t enough water to go around any more, and the Thar – a desert the size of England – is creeping inexorably northwest towards Punjab.
A 2006 simulation by the Indian Institute for Tropical Meteorology, in partnership with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, paints a grim picture of the years to come. In the next 60 years, rainfall in this strip is predicted to drop by close to a third (while falling more heavily on Gujarat and southern Rajasthan). Temperatures will climb by more than five per cent. ‘Ganganagar and the adjoining places in Punjab, in the light of simulation modelling by different institutes for climate change, show definite trends of drying,’ says Dr Amal Kar, principal scientist at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute in the nearby city of Jodhpur.
Already, many of the villages on the road between Gharsana and the city of Ganganagar are encircled by fields of shifting dunes. ‘Time is running short,’ says Kar. ‘The 2020s are going to be the worst period – that’s what the climate models say – and we are not preparing ourselves.’
The 11 trillion litres of irrigation water Rajasthan is supposed to receive each year from the rivers and dams of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab should be enough to make up for its steadily reducing rainfall levels. But for the past ten years, the state has rarely received even half that amount.
What Indira Gandhi’s government didn’t take into account when it shipped in migrants and resettled Baldev and 1,600 other Himachali families, was that the water from the Himalayan hills only reaches Rajasthan once it has passed through Punjab or Haryana. Under the law that regulates the canal, the desert state comes last in the queue, only entitled to receive its irrigation water once Punjab, Delhi and Haryana have received a guaranteed minimum supply. ‘Whenever there is a deficit in the rainfall, Rajasthan is the victim,’ Bishnoi says grimly.
Local uprising
Sant Lekha Singh’s angry growl rises to a hoarse shout as his speech enters its final crescendo. ‘Water is our employment, water is our right,’ the towering Sikh union leader tells the crowd sitting cross-legged before him. ‘If the government does not provide water, then they may provide death … and we will accept it.’
As their leader stokes up the fiery rhetoric, farmers trickle into the corrugated iron hangar where Gharsana’s annual grain harvest is collected, some hugging ornamental Sikh spears as if prepared for battle. With 5,000 farmers taking part, this is the largest water protest Rajasthan has seen since the winter of 2004, when 20,000 farmers from 5MLD rioted, attacking government offices and smashing dam infrastructure to release water onto their parched lands. The police retaliated with gunfire, leaving six farmers dead.
‘This could be 20 times as horrible as 2004,’ threatens Singh. ‘The Congress Party has shown us a picture of death, and a person who has seen a picture of death can do anything.’
None of this disturbs the aura of refined calm emanating from Ashutosh AT Pednekar, the district collector, Ganganagar’s most senior government official, as he sits in his airy office. ‘It’s not a question of a water crisis,’ he asserts in crisp, well-educated English. ‘We are in talks with the farmers and we are making adequate arrangements for whatever contingencies might arrive. I think that should be enough.’
But the irrigation department is prepared for trouble, worried that the unrest will lead to conflict with neighbouring states, further endangering their supplies. ‘There will be more fights between Rajasthan and Punjab, because the law and order problem will get worse,’ Bishnoi predicts. ‘These Marxist leaders are seeking ground in Rajasthan. They know that water is not available in the dams, but even then they are pushing the cultivators to agitation, saying, “You can get more than your fair share”.’
The 2004 protests brought India’s Communists to power in Anupgarh, their first seat in the state, and if the ruling Congress Party wants to stop them spreading further, it will need to beg for its full water supplies from the Punjab government. But that government is led by the Congress Party’s opposition, the Sikh Akali Dal party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Even during the four years when the governments of the two states were allies, Punjab still refused to supply the water that Rajasthan claims has been due since the Indira Gandhi Canal was extended in 2000.
Bishnoi accuses Punjab and Haryana of secretly juggling water between dams and canals to deny Rajasthan as much as three trillion litres of the water it deserves. And then there is Pakistan, over the tense border, which accuses India of breaking the terms of the 1960 treaty under which the two divide up India’s six western Himalayan rivers.
Fifteen years ago, Ismail Serageldin, the Egyptian former World Bank vice president, conjectured that, just as the wars of the last century were fought over oil, the wars of this one would be fought over water. This strip looks set to be one of the battlefields.
Farmed out
Hari Kailash looks helplessly at his withered cotton field, his eyes reddened and his shoulders slumped. The only greenery is a small patch of grass he has grown for his cattle by illegally siphoning off drinking water. ‘Fifteen years ago, we made a lot of money,’ laments Suresh Devi, his mother. ‘We used to have labourers working for us. We had a tractor, and look at this house we built. Now we don’t even have money to buy whitewash for it. It seems we are going to die without food.’
Kailash has given up on receiving water from the canal. He now plans to shut down his farm and move to Punjab or Haryana to work as a temporary labourer. In doing so, he will be following many others in Anupgarh: for the first time since 1927 – when the area’s enlightened maharaja, Ganga Singh, built the Ganga Canal to bring Punjab’s river water to Ganganagar for the first time – the flow of migrants has reversed, with hundreds of thousands crossing the border to Punjab to seek work. Manohar Lal says that more than a third of the farmers in DD7 have already left. Many of them have even put their land up for sale, but there are few buyers.
Pednekar, the collector, is convinced that even with today’s reduced supply of irrigation water, Ganganagar can still support its people. ‘We believe that with the kind of resources that we have right now, if they’re efficiently utilised, this area will really bloom,’ he says.
Some 20 years after the World Bank agreed to provide funds, work is finally going ahead to line stretches of the main Gang Canal with bricks, which, Pednekar says, should increase levels of irrigation in those areas by around 15 per cent. He also talks of expanding the area under drip cultivation, which can provide an 80 per cent water saving, of growing higher value crops such as citrus, and of swapping thirsty crops such as wheat and rice for mustard and lentils.
‘The kind of analogy that we are giving is Israel, which is similar in terms of topography – it’s a desert state, and so is this. It’s not about water availability, it depends on how best you make use of it,’ he says.
And a few years back, he would not have found a more whole-hearted supporter than Vinay Godar. The agriculture teacher took over the family farm from his tenants only five years ago, and embraced all of the most up-to-date thinking on farming arid land. Black plastic piping snakes over the dusty earth of his farm; citrus trees are interspersed with cotton. On the least irrigated areas, some of which are barely distinguishable from the adjacent desert, he’s experimenting with new crops such as pomegranate. ‘Many people used to come here to see my fields because I was doing such new work to fight against the desert,’ he says.
Now he surveys his land with a look that borders on disgust. ‘We sowed this on the rain two months ago,’ he says, pointing to a dusty field of shrivelled crops. ‘Guar seed needs only two rains to get a yield: if it had rained only once, if we had got only one watering from the canal, we would have yielded it. But we didn’t even get that.
‘I know every technique of farming,’ he concludes ruefully. ‘but I do not know how to farm without water.’
Home truths
Godar has his teaching to fall back on. Baldev, who is stuck with his conservative farming methods, complains that even in a good year, he now receives a tenth of the income he did a decade ago. If conditions don’t improve, he may sell up and return to Himachal Pradesh, where his family still has a house.
And in a strange twist, when the water in the Pong reservoir gets really low, Baldev’s old village land begins to re-emerge. He’s seen it a few times during his annual trips home. Some of his former neighbours have even started farming it in the dry season.
‘It’s very fertile,’ he says, with a look of wonder. ‘It’s as if it still holds all of the lake water inside it.’
April 2010
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