Gujarat polls led BJP rulers to postpone announcement of water scarcity: Top CM aide

Sharply reacting to Counterview story (click HERE), which said, quoting Gujarat government sources, that the state's farmers will not be provided with Narmada waters this summer because the waters would diverted to Madhya Pradesh agricultural fields in view of the elections there this year, a top aide of Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani has said, "There is real shortage, and this the only reason why Gujarat farmers wouldn't be able to get waters."
However, the aide, known to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, admitted that "we did not announce the shortage earlier because of political reasons." According to him, "In November last year, ahead of the Gujarat elections, the indications were clear: There was going to be a sharp shortfall of Narmada waters for irrigation. But as it was a poll year, we did not make it known..."
Dishing out "official" figures to prove his point, the top aide said, "In November 2017, it was more than clear that the availability of water from the Narmada dam would be 5.3 million acre feet (MAF) as against the actual allocation of 9 MAF to Gujarat. As time passed, we found that the availability would be progressively going down, and as of today, the estimate is down to 4.67 MAF, not enough to irrigate the state's agricultural fields."
Denying that industry is being supplied "more water" than what it is allowed at the cost of agriculture, as alleged by senior farmers' leader Sagar Rabari, the aide said, Gujarat's industry should be allocated 0.2 MAF water, but the water that would be supplied to it too would go down to 0.16 MAF. "We get daily figures and analyse them. There is no manipulation."
The aide, at the same time, admitted, that there is a "distinct possibility" that the Madhya Pradesh government, with an eye on elections, may have stored "as much Narmada water as possible in its dams", though claiming, "There is a limitation to the amount of water they can store. This monsoon, there hasn't been much rain in the Narmada catchment area, which mainly fall in Madhya Pradesh. There is little inflow now."
The aide said, "In fact, there appears to be little possibility of irrigating agricultural fields in Madhya Pradesh, too, by extracting water from the state's existing dams and sending them into the canals", though adding, "We have reports that, like we did at the Narmada dam, the dams in Madhya Pradesh also have built ground-level canals to extract water during drought-like situations, which they might use this summer to appease farmers."
Built in the year 2000, the two so-called two integrated by-pass tunnels (IPBTs) in the Narmada dam in Gujarat to draw dead waters from the dam’s reservoir during drought years had gone controversial after two neighbours, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, protested against the state’s "intention" to use the IPBTs, as they believed, their use would hit power being produced at the dam.

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Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

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