The Hindu : Antony hard put to console angry farmers

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Mar 25, 2004

National

National - Elections 2004

Antony hard put to console angry farmers

P. Venugopal

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

It is only the month of March and the worst phase of the summer still looms ahead, past the May 10 polling day in Kerala.

The Chief Minister, A.K. Antony, has been touring the districts in the past few days trying to console the farmers who have been driven to desperation by one of the worst droughts in recent years.

In Palakkad district, known as the granary of the State, where paddy crop in over 40,000 hectares has been destroyed, he listens to the farmers narrate their woes. They blame the Government for its failure to get Kerala's due share of the water from the Parambikkulam-Aliyar reservoir, situated within the State, but controlled by neighbouring Tamil Nadu under an inter-State water pact.

He moves on to Wayanad, where extensive tracts of coffee and pepper plantations stand withered. The next day, he is in Kuttanad to witness the devastation caused by seawater intrusion into the sprawling paddy fields. Here too the farmers blame the Government for the calamity, because the shutters of a salt-water barrier built to protect the crop are in a state of disrepair this season.

Mr. Antony's `road show', as his political detractors prefer to call his tour, then shifts to Idukki district, where several tea companies have been closed and starvation stalks the settlements of the plantation workers.

Nowhere does he mention anything about the elections.

In a State with 44 rivers and more than 300 cm of annual rainfall, he finds villagers struggling for drinking water and townsfolk waiting with pots on the roadside for tankers that arrive once in two days. Newspapers splashing reports on his tour on their front pages, also carry, in their inside pages, stories about farmers ending their lives by consuming pesticides. Then there are stories about withered crop being set ablaze by angry farmers in one place or the other.

Said Mr. Antony, when pressed by media persons during his tour the other day: "No, water is not a political issue here. It is the most vital issue confronting the State."

Surely, the elections could not have come at a more inopportune moment for the Congress-led United Democratic Front, which had nine out of 20 members from the State in the outgoing Lok Sabha.

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