Rethinking Revolutions: An excerpt

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 12:37:02 +0000

The deep black soil, the basalt rock underlying it, and the monsoons, have together, shaped water management practices and crop choices on the Malwa plateau. Soyabean came and changed all that. Water, which was considered scarce in this dryland region and was percolated in the fields during the rainy season, became excess when the fields were planted with soyabean. In conjunction with the advent of water-guzzling wheat, soyabean converted Malwa into a land of water scarcity. The government’s push for rural electrification and its intervention in agrarian markets by instituting minimum support prices (MSP) were the other factors which came together with these non-human forces. Farmers chose to use the remuneration from growing soyabean to invest in water-extraction technologies, which also became available at the same time, because growing wheat was becoming profitable. These forces, acting together, have created a crisis of enormous magnitude. There is barely any water for drinking in Malwa in the hot summer.