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Opinion Editorial

Published: April 9, 2013 01:06 IST | Updated: April 9, 2013 01:06 IST
Water on his mind
Had anyone suggested that one day Ajit Pawar would be compared to Marie Antoinette, it would have been
laughable. But the Maharashtra deputy chief ministers recent statement about his own urine making up for the
shortfall of water in the State is distastefully reminiscent of the infamous French queens proclamation let them eat
cake. While Mr. Pawars statements are coarser, they are just as callous, if not grotesque, and very much in keeping
with his self-proclaimed image of a tagya, or ruffian. It is convenient to have an uncle to apologise for you and the
senior Pawar has done that on more than one occasion. This time, however, the brash nephew has overstepped the
line and no apology from any quarter can mitigate this. Ajits remarks are especially cruel, coming from a man who
headed the irrigation department in the State for a decade, during which, if the Economic Survey is to be believed,
only 0.1 per cent of irrigated cover was added at a cost of Rs 70,000 crore. As the man at the helm of affairs, he had
to quit last September, ostensibly not to influence a White Paper on the colossal mess.
The farce didnt end there. After the government brought out its promised White Paper on irrigation, which was like
a record of dams built in the State with little on corruption or mismanagement, Mr. Pawar sailed back into the
cabinet by December 2012. At least three official investigation reports on the irrigation scenario in Maharashtra
have exposed the deep-seated mismanagement and siphoning off of funds which plague the sector, and
departmental inquiries are under way. It is difficult to believe that the buck stops with executive engineers or the
heads of the irrigation development corporations. The State falls short of fixing accountability on the topmost
decision maker, in this case, the minister himself, for who will bell the cat? The contractor-politician nexus is
thriving and the rising number of contractors being elevated to public life is not a coincidence. What is doubly
callous is that it is this same man who should have ensured the States irrigation sector is not floundering the way it
is who has now made crude comments about a farmer making a simple demand water for his fields. The other
crude remark Mr. Pawar made was on electricity, or the lack of it. As power minister too, he could not keep his
promise of ridding the State of load-shedding by last year. Ribaldry cannot erase his abject failure to improve the
situation. Though the Nationalist Congress Party has sought to make light of Mr. Pawars humour, the party and
its ally, the Congress, should not underestimate the grave damage he has caused to the image of the government.
Keywords: Ajit Pawar, Maharashtra drought, Ajit Pawars drought remark
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