By Ranjit Devraj
BHUBANESHWAR, Feb 19 2001 (IPS)

If India’s eastern coastal Orissa state is able to cope with a severe drought looming over the province, it will be due to lessons learnt from a ‘super- cyclone’ that killed thousands of people 16 months ago.

Even as large areas of the Indian subcontinent brace for the annual natural water scarcity that hits tens of millions of peasants, authorities in Orissa’s capital Bhubaneshwar say they are better prepared now.

The state is setting up a natural disaster-preparedness system with the support of international agencies that have been helping to cope with the aftermath of the October 1999 super-cyclone, which arose from the Bay of Bengal.

With technical assistance from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and 357,000 U.S. dollars from the British government’s Department for International Development (DfID), Orissa has begun a long-term programme of water conservation.

This centres on watershed development schemes that aim to check the erosion of green cover and popularise other simple rain water conservation methods.

“In all, 400 million dollars will be spent on a Watershed Mission over the next ten years and 5,000 watersheds will be built in an area covering 2.5 million hectares,” said Navin Patnaik, Orissa’s chief minister.

The bulk of tillers in mainly rural India depend on the four- month monsoon, which starts June, to water their lands. Large parts of western and central India are already in the grip of a drought, following scanty rainfall in the past year.

In Orissa, thousands of landless farm hands and marginal farmers, have begun their seasonal migration to far away cities in northern Uttar Pradesh state, adjoining Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh states, in search of work.

According to a report by the peasants’ group, ‘Paschim Orissa Krishijeevi Sangh’ (western Orissa farm workers’ federation), large numbers of women have joined the men this year in the migration.

The elderly have been left behind in the villages, while some poor families have even sold their children to pay off debts, says the report.

Indian news television channels reported mid-February from Orissa’s drought-hit Bargarh district, the story of three-year-old Hema who was ‘sold’ by her landless peasant parents to the man they owed 100 dollars.

The Orissa peasant group’s report says food scarcity has even forced people into eating poisonous roots. Orissa is the home of the infamous Kalahandi district, known for large-scale starvation deaths in the past.

State authorities are hopeful that the anti-drought schemes would make a difference this summer. State chief minister Patnaik expects 27 watershed schemes, costing 3.5 million dollars and covering 53,000 hectates, to take off early March.

Patnaik said Orissa was fortunate because the UNDP decided to extend its programme of natural disaster-preparedness from the cyclone-affected coastal districts, to the state’s drought-prone areas in the interior.

“Recurrent vulnerability to natural calamities is a critical dimension of the state’s poverty profile and I am glad that the U.N. system is collaborating with us in a significant way to substantially augment our disaster preparedness and management capability,” the chief minister said.

The U.N. system’s inter sectoral team, led by UNDP official Saroj K. Jha, is coordinating the activities of the National U.N. Volunteers, which consists of doctors, engineers, information technology experts and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

” The IST proved its worth by assisting NGOs and U.N. organisations in directing projects and resources towards people who need them most as well as in identifying areas where emergency interventions are called for,” explains Jha.

According to UNDP chief Mark Malloch-Brown, who visited Orissa mid-February, the Orissa experience and the role of the IST is becoming a model of coordination among U.N. organisations, which “have a legacy of not working closely together.”

The IST has already succeeded in “changing the thinking of the (state) government” in tackling drought, says Jha.

The earlier emphasis on handing out lucrative contracts for digging tubewells and roads, which were supposed to generate work for drought-hit peasants, has given way to building watersheds, says Jha.

A drought is a “creeping, silent emergency”, which takes years to develop, says Jha. It is linked to lack of good land and water management and sharp social and economic imbalances in the countryside, he adds.

Seventy percent of Orissa’s rainwater flows into the Bay of Bengal, without efforts being made to conserve it, says Jha.

According to N. Devadasan who leads the IST’s team of 10 doctors, the super-cyclone forced a complete overhaul of the state’s shabby rural basic health care services.

“We managed to train, over the last year, 13,000 village level staff to strengthen the disease surveillance system,” says Devadasan, who is on deputation from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The UNDP’s natural disaster-preparedness plan in Orissa’s 30 districts also includes the preparation of a geographical information system.

This covers risk assessment, vulnerability analysis, and blueprints for response to earthquakes, cyclones, floods and health epidemics.

Excerpt: