The severe drought that the
country is facing has brought untold miserly to crores of people in the
affected areas.
While the government must act and is so doing in many cases,
the magnitude of the drought is so huge that government intervention is simply not enough. The more fortunate amongst us owe it to the country and the
suffering people of Marathwada,
Beed, Vidarbha, Latur, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Bundelkkhand,
Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Jharkhand & Orissa to
extend assistance on a war footing to see that this situation does not repeat
next year.
While relief and other amelioration measures are being taken by the
Government, I appeal to the doyens
of our industry to take the lead and undertake digging out of large water catchment
ponds to be able to catch the rains when they arrive in another 6 to 8 weeks
time.
What is required for this is the deployment of a large number of Heavy Duty mechanized excavators so that
we can dig out a minimum of 10 "water catchment ponds" having capacity to
store at least 100,000 litres of water each in each of 10 affected areas listed
above. this means we will be creating water holding capacity of a minimum
of 1 lakh litres of water in each of the above areas which will be a good back up for the local population for the coming months.
Hopefully with a good monsoon (as has been predicted by the Met)
some of the store water may also
seep into adjoining areas and generally raise the water table.
This is a very simple action - no high technology or complicated
process in involved. It requires only money to deploy the excavators. The cost that the industry will incur for
such an effort is a drop in the ocean compared to the tremendous goodwill that their
actions will generate as well as the huge “physical saving of lives” they will
bring about by their this single action. This can even be treated as part of industry's CSR activity.
I appeal to our stalwart industrialists like
M/s. Ratan
Tata, Cyrus Mistry, Kumarmangalam Birla, B. K.Birla, Deepak Parekh, Rahul
Bajaj, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani, Azim Premji, Pallonji Mistry, Naveen Jindal,
Sajjan Jindal, Pankaj Munjal, Adi Godrej, Nadi Godrej, AjayPiramal, Dilip
Piramal, Anil Agarwal, Biki Oberoi, Cyrus Poonawalla, Deshbandhu Gupta, Dilip
Shanghvi, Gautam Adani, Dr. Pratap Reddy, G. M. Rao, Karsanbhai Patel, Kiran
Shaw, Kushal Pal Singh, Mallika Srinivasan, Malvinder Singh, Narayan Murthy,
Nandan Nilekani, Narendra Patni, Naresh Goyal, Nusli Wadia, Priya Paul, Rajan
Raheja, Sunil Mittal, Ramesh Agarwal, Raunaq Singh, Ravi and Shashi Ruia,
Ronnie Screwvala, Rakesh Jhunjhunwalla, Shiv Nadar, Shobhana Bhartia, Subhash
Chandra Goyal, Uday Kotak, Venugopal Dhoot, Yogesh Deveshwar, Yusuf Hamied, A.
M. Naik as well as all others
to please contribute to this effort which is crying need for the nation
today and help our unfortunate citizens in the above areas who have been hit by
drought for the 3rd year running.
This is one thing that the
industry can do speedily and efficiently with dramatic and immediate benefits
to all populace in the drought affected areas.
With a lot of hope and expectation.
An ordinary citizen
