Agarwal says he finds that argument incorrect because he has rarely met a politician, especially in India, who will not emphasise the importance of water. The real problem, he says, is that hardly any of them know how to solve the water problem. And teaching them is difficult. Agarwal reminds us of former prime minister Chandrashekhar and his Bharat Yatra.

The most important thing on his development agenda after he completed his marathon was water. Even Atal Behari Vajpayee's address to Parliament on the NDA's action plan for the nation is important. Vajpayee had said that if there was one thing he was going to do in the five years of his rule, assuming he had the good fortune to complete his tenure, was to ensure that all villages would get drinking water. Agarwal says Rajiv Gandhi went beyond rhetoric to actually set up a drinking water mission.

"So many will term what is happening in Gujarat and Rajasthan a natural disaster," says Agarwal. "But this is far from the truth. It is a government made disaster. Over the last 100 years or so, we have seen two paradigm shifts in water management. One, that individuals and communities have steadily given over their role almost completely to the state. Two, the simple technology of using rainwater has declined. Instead, exploitation of rivers and groundwater through dams and tubewells has become the key source of water. As water in rivers and aquifers is only a small portion of the total rainwater availability, there is an inevitable growing and, in many cases, unbearable stress on these sources."

This dependence on the state has meant that cost recovery has been poor, and the financial sustainability of water schemes has run aground. Repairs and maintenance is abysmal. With people having no interest in using water carefully, the sustainability of water resources has itself become a question mark, says Agarwal. As a result, there are serious problems with government drinking water supply schemes.

Despite government efforts, the number of `problem villages' does not seem to go down. Agarwal quotes N C Saxena, former rural development secretary, as saying, "In our mathematics, 200,000 problem villages minus 200,000 problem villages is still 200,000 problem villages!" Community based rainwater harvesting, the paradigm of the past, has in it as much strength today as it ever did before. A survey conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) of several villages facing drought in Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh last December revealed that those villages that had undertaken rainwater harvesting or watershed development in the past had no drinking water problem. They even had some water left over to irrigate their crops. But neighbouring villages were desperate for water. Agarwal says it is obvious that rainwater harvesting can even meet the acid test of drought.

In late March, he got further confirmation of the fact. He was travelling with President K R Narayanan in a helicopter to the Arvari watershed, and could see nothing but barren fields all the way from Delhi to Alwar. This area was suffering from drought. But suddenly, says Agarwal, they came across green and brown fields and realised they had reached the oasis of the Arvari watershed. Here, over the last 5-10 years, several villages have built hundreds of rainwater harvesting structures. While the Arvari river was more or less dead, the wells were still full of water, and the fields rich and productive.