K. Balagopal RIP

I have come across the name of Balagopal only after seeing the obituaries in KafilaThe Passing Away of a Hero – Goodbye Balagopal and Outlook Kandala Balagopal RIP . If only I had met him on my several trips to A.P. it seems that I could have learnt some on developmental matters.
Kafila has a discussion of his article Beyond violence and non-violence. Outlook gives a link to his excellent EPW article Andhra Pradesh:Beyond Media Images which discusses factionalism in Rayalaseema, rise of YSR, unintended consequences of developmental activities like:
"The major irrigation source of Rayalaseema, however, used to be the excellent system of tanks constructed by the Rayas of Vijayanagar, from whom the region gets its name. Like the rulers of Hyderabad and Warangal to the north, the Rayas of Vijayanagar got constructed a system of tanks all over the region to husband the scarce water resources and channel them to the fields. Indeed, most of the kings who ruled the various parts of the Deccan, and not merely the Telugu country, built such tanks to provide water for drinking and irrigation to the populace. A characteristic of the irrigation tanks of Rayalaseema is their huge size, probably because rainfall there is even more scarce, and demands even more comprehensive husbanding of water than elsewhere in the Deccan.

This tank system, as indeed everywhere in the Deccan, is however in a shambles, now. Almost nothing has been done for their upkeep during the last several decades. Because of the denudation of the land around, even the slightest rainfall causes inrush of water into the tanks, breaching the poorly maintained bund. The breaches merit only the most cosmetic of repairs, and as a result, the tank bunds are but bundles of ill-repaired breaches. For the same reason, all the tanks are heavily silted, so heavily indeed that they look more like irregular-shaped football fields than irrigation tanks. In the days before chemical fertilisers, the silt was prized by farmers as a source of fertile topsoil, but now nobody is interested in taking the silt to fertilise their fields, and so de-silting, if it is to be done comprehensively, would be akin to a mass waste-removal exercise. As such, it is too costly for the funds governments are willing to spare for the upkeep of traditional irrigation systems.

The upshot is reliance on increasing use of groundwater, through deeper and deeper borewells. But this is a self-destructive game, for the deeper farmers dig wells in competition with each other, the deeper they will have to dig next time round. The scarce rainfall cannot sustain this technology-driven thirst for groundwater. In 2002, in the midst of the second successive year of drought, a middle class farmer of YSR's Cuddapah district had dug a borewell 1,000 feet deep, and still did not find water. ("If only I had persevered a little more, I may have struck oil" was, however, the farmer's only response to commiseration, for a sense of humour rarely forsakes farmers, even in the worst of adversities)."

The Outlook has also link to Interview of Dr. Balagopal by Janam Saxi .

P.S. I came to know today that Dr. K. Balagopal was a grandson of Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sarma about him I posted earlier in My favourite Telugu scholar: Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sarma
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Hyderabad Book Trust obituary and links to two books in Telugu by Dr. K. Balagopal:
పౌరహక్కులకు మరో పేరు బాలగోపాల్‌ - హైదరాబాద్‌ బుక్‌ ట్రస్ట్‌ నివాళి .
Varavara Rao on Balagopal's Warangal days బాలగోపాల్‌ ప్రజాజీవిత ప్రారంభం - వరంగల్లు (1979-95) .
See also the post in Blogbharti Remembering K.Balagopal and K.Sekhar's comment:
"What surprises his many admirers is why did it take so long for him to condemn the Maoist (PWG)violence? Ideological obstinacy-a strong trait of Marxist scholars is the answer. Notwithstanding such shortcomings Balagopal was a great human being.A symbol of austere living he never carved for celebrity status or foreign trips.His passing away is a great loss to the excluded and the oppressed.He left the world too early leaving his mission incomplete."


P.P.S. The comments in the Kaila post Saluting a Revolutionary: Jinee Lokaneeta by Nivedita Menon give two further links.
A web archive on Balagopal
Telugu articles by Balagopal in Andhrajyothy.