Drought-stricken villagers race against worsening drought

KURLA, India - Millions of desperate villagers scrounged for food and water in drought-stricken western India Thursday as the government and United Nations scrambled to provide relief from the worsening crisis.

More than 50 million poor villagers have been affected by the drought in the western desert state of Rajasthan and adjoining Gujarat state, officials said. But 30 million others suffer from water shortages in nine other states in the northern half of the country, the national government said in a status report published Thursday.

Hundreds of millions of cattle have died, and residents of thousands of villages have fled their homes to other states.

''We are accelerating our programs,'' said G. Padmanabhan, a senior rural development official with the United Nations Development Program in New Delhi. ''There were several projects which were to be completed over a year or more. We are now trying to complete them in two months,'' he said in a telephone interview.

The projects include building canals and reservoirs for the storage and transport of water reserves.

In many areas, villagers waited in vain for help to arrive. But several used their bare hands to start digging their own tiny wells, some reaching at about six feet before finding dirty, brackish water. Then they constructed a circular boundary around the wells, built a lid with crisscrossed wooden branches and attached locks to keep others away from the water.

When food and water ran out, the animals started dying. The villagers fled but anointed their beloved animals with traditional Hindu markings on their foreheads as a form of blessing.

''I had 50 sheep. Forty are dead. The others are dying,'' said Bansi Lal, a shepherd in the Mungre Ki Thani village. He pointed to the carcasses lying strewn a few hundred yards away from each other.

In the past three years, nothing has grown on the dusty expanse outside his village where dense barley fields once made the desert green for a few months out of the year.

Hungry camels sauntered along a narrow road through a dusty, dry landscape. They walked past trees and shrubs shorn of leaves, eaten by hungry goats and sheep.

Since no crops grew, there has been little fodder for the animals. The relatively rich farmers buy fodder brought from neighboring states and sold at $3.50 for a maund, a unit of 20 pounds - twice what the farmers paid earlier.