Saurashtrians Resolve to Make Their Villages Water Sufficient
This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-118, May-Jun 2000)
The drought that actually occurred last year but hit the headlines this year brought into sharp focus the gross mismanagement of natural resources in India due to malgovernance, inefficiency and corruption. We have all been saturated with those depressing stories coming to us through the mass media which itself woke up too late to the coming crisis. However, the good news is that there is a new ferment all over the country with many people declaring: “No more of crippling dependence on the government.” Citizens are beginning to explore ways of taking charge of their own environment, and expecting the government to either leave them alone or play a supportive role rather than act the tyrannical lord.
Not surprisingly, such community initiatives are getting institutionalised in rural areas far more rapidly than in metropolitan cities. Because our villages have been far more callously neglected than urban centres, it has become a matter of life and death for the rural population to regain control over their own lives. In this issue, we introduce our readers to one such important initiative from Gujarat where one individual managed to galvanise a whole community into collective action to combat droughts, and water scarcity. From the signs of it, this is having a powerful ripple effect in many other areas of life too…