MAKING A POINT: Magsaysay Award winner Rajendra Singh (centre) addressing a press conference in Gulbarga on Wednesday. B.R. Patil, MLA (left), and B.L. Patil, Director of CAPART, are with him.

GULBARGA: Magsaysay Award winner and water conservationist Rajendra Singh on Wednesday demanded that the Union Government enact a water security act like the Food Security Act highlighting the responsibilities of the State to ensure adequate supply of water and prevent privatisation of water supply.

Mr. Singh, who brought about a revolutionary change in more than 1,050 villages in the drought-prone Alwar district in Rajasthan, told presspersons here that the day was not far when countries would wage wars for water.

He said like the Food Security Act in the late 1960s which resulted in the Green Revolution and helped achieve self-sufficiency in foodgrain production, there was a need for a water security act to prevent multinational companies from taking over water supply and also to enforce discipline in the scientific use of the available water. Mr. Singh said the Government wanted to give up its legitimate duty of ensuring adequate water supply by allowing the multinational companies to take over the task, under pressure from the World Bank and other financial agencies.

In the 1980s, 1,058 villages in Alwar district in Rajasthan were declared a "black zone" with the groundwater levels dipping alarmingly; now the same villages had been declared "White Zones" as the water level had gone up greatly. This change was made possible through the involvement of people in the affected villages by focussing on water conservation through construction of 8,600 water harvesting structures. Mr. Singh said water was nature's gift and no Government had any right to collect charges for supplying it to the people, and the management of the available water and its conservation were the need of hour and "we need to launch a sustained struggle against privatisation of water supply."

Opposing the river-linking project, Mr. Singh who is a member of the high-powered committee constituted by the Union Government on the project, said this was another design of the World Bank and other agencies to gain control over the rich water resources in the country. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which had come forward to provide assistance for urban development, had set supply of drinking water in urban areas as a top priority.

Mr. Singh said the proposed river-linking project was doomed to fail due to the high cost of linking rivers. To a question, Mr. Singh said the dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over sharing Cauvery waters could have been solved easily by involving farmers in the command areas of both States, but the issue had been needlessly politicised.

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