Blog They cry when it rains By Ajay Jha, Chief Correspondent Barmer - Desert dwellers habitually look up at skies and a mere sight of even a patch of cloud theoretically should make them happy considering they live in a parched land. The desert dwellers of the Rajasthan’s side of the Great Thar Desert are no different. They also keep looking up at the skies above. The big difference being that clouds do not bring smiles on their faces and rains brings tears into their eyes. The reasons for their reverse reaction are not very difficult to understand. Rains mean loss of revenue to them. Those settled at villages along the Indo-Pak border near Munabo, which happens to be the last settlement on the Indian side before Sindh province of Pakistan start, simply hate rains. They own large tracts of land and the common way to describe their landholdings is “as far as you can run, I own that piece of land”. The modus operandi is simple. They take loan from banks by mortgaging their land. The loan is waved off once the area is officially declared drought-affected. On the other hand even a light rain means either they have to pay back to banks or get back to farming which they hate doing, as it is the harder way of making money. It is their sheer bad luck that the average annual rainfall in the Great Thar Desert is increasing and that is good enough reasons for them to hate global warming and the rains, as the only thing they know cultivating is opium, which sadly is illegal in India.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 08:53:44 +0000
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