Opinion Moonshine for water

The real horror is that living standards in Mumbai’s shanties are better than they are in rural India. In our villages the chances of a child surviving till its fifth birthday are bleak. This is because standards of rural healthcare are abysmal and mothers are often illiterate and incapable of understanding the simple measures that would save a child’s life. One of the primary reasons for female illiteracy is that rural Indian women spend many hours in the day finding water for the family. Usually they walk miles and miles to find it.

What little time they have left,after this daily search for water,is spent gathering fuel wood for the primitive mud stoves on which they cook the family meal. If our brilliant scientists spent more time on finding solutions to earthly problems they would by now have come up with a new,improved version of the rural ‘chulha’. It would transform the lives of millions of Indian women. And,the lives of millions of Indian children would be saved if our scientists concentrated on inventing affordable technology to purify water.

Why should we be looking for water on the moon before we achieve such important earthly goals? Why should we be building nuclear weapons before we have succeeded in making electricity available in all our villages? According to India Today’s just released ‘State of the States’ report,‘Only 17.4 per cent of rural households have electricity and only 57.2 per cent of villages are electrified’. After 62 years of Independence this is shameful but not even our proudly rural politicians seem to care. The two mighty Yadavs,Lalu and Mulayam,spend their time acquiring urban habits and sending their children to English schools and foreign universities.

The only major Indian politician who shows deep concern about the horrible conditions in which the vast majority of Indians live is Rahul Gandhi. The problem with his approach is that he seems to treat his forays into the wilds of rural India as a kind of escapade. Through the fog of jet lag and travel weariness I noticed that he gave his policemen the slip again last week and disappeared for a whole night during which he popped up out of the darkness at sundry teashops in eastern Uttar Pradesh. And,then around dawn was discovered eating jalebis near the Nepalese border. This is a recklessly unserious method of dealing with our most serious problems.

As someone who aspires one day to becoming our Prime Minister,it is time Rahulji went beyond these nocturnal outings. Now that he has spent many nights in the huts of desperately poor Dalit families,he knows just how bad things are. What he needs to do is make good use of his fieldwork. He could gather around him our most brilliant scientists and administrators and order them to find solutions to India’s water problems before the next general election. Nearly every country in the world has found their own solutions to their water problems. It makes no sense that a country that can make nuclear bombs and explore the mysteries of the moon should find it so hard to find solutions to its most basic problems. Forgive me,but try as I have,I find myself unable to become even slightly excited that Indian scientists have made history by finding water on the moon. It’s time that we brought them down to earth and demanded from them solutions to some of our grim,earthly problems.