This is obviously not my year for catching up with a drought. It is not as if the facts, or rather what the venerable Narayana Murthy of Infosys would call “data”, do not confirm a drought. Nationwide, this is the worst drought of the century by far. The overall rainfall figure of 77 per cent of LPA (Long Period Average) is a clear five percentage points worse than 1987, which remains imprinted in our heads as the worst drought of the last century. I have also not been traveling in the wrong geographies. I went driving through Punjab and Haryana, the states with huge shortfalls — the latter being the worst, with a deficit of nearly 60 per cent — and reported the somewhat startling findings to you (‘Drought-proofing politics’, National Interest, August 15). That sighting of endless green all over the region has now been confirmed by the very strong paddy procurement figures in both states.

And the region we, a motley group of journalists, economists, financial wizards, psephologists and TV anchors, the self-styled “Limousine Liberals”, have chosen to watch elections in Maharashtra, could have been hand-picked for distress tourism at any time. And even more so now, when every district along the nearly 500 km between Aurangabad and Nagpur has a monsoon deficiency ranging from 18 to 27 per cent (deficit figures for Aurangabad, Buldhana, Akola, Amravati, Nagpur). But you can’t find or see distress. At least not so easily as you would expect to do in what has now been written off by the “povertarians” in the media and the NGOs as “suicide country”. Remember our definition of “povertarians”, as explained by the very simple credo of its practitioners and peddlers: poverty is my birthright, but you shall have it.

... contd.