Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh: It’s a conventional Indian cinema fight-in-the-wasteland scene. Against the heritage of dunes and depressions with a tiny sprinkling of scrub flowers, the hero rises from the burning sands of a barren wasteland to beat the terrible guys to a pulp. Then, adding lots of warmth and dirt to that already bestowed by using nature brings the film to a happy conclusion (besides the villains). Countless Indian movies have staged the one’s scenes in some desolate tract of Rajasthan. Or even in the ravines of the Chambal valley in Madhya Pradesh.
This arid, desolate tract scene (see video clip) used no locations from Rajasthan or the Chambal. Instead, it became shot deep within the southern peninsula, in Andhra Pradesh’s Rayalaseema place. This precise patch of a few 1,000 acres in Anantapur district – as soon as blanketed via millet cultivation – has grown to be more and more wilderness over many a long time. That has been driven using often paradoxical factors – and created the type of space that filmmakers send out place scouts to search for.
In Dargah Honor village, where the major landowners of this patch live, it was hard to get all and sundry to agree that we had no longer been filming area scouts. “Which movie is that this for? When is it coming?” changed into either an express query or one on their minds. With some, you could see a brief ebbing of hobby once they found out we had been journalists. The Telugu filmmakers that made the region famous – Jayam Manade Raa (Victory is Ours) – shot the fight scenes between 1998 and 2000. As any diligent business filmmakers would, they tinkered with their ‘set’ to decorate the desert effect.
“We needed to uproot our crop (for which they compensated us),” says Pujari Linganna, 45, whose circle of relatives owns the 34 acres wherein the fight became shot. “We eliminated a few vegetation and small bushes so that it might look more real.” Deft camerawork and the wise use of filters did the rest. If the makers of Jayam Manade Raa were taking pictures of a 20-years-after sequel nowadays, they might have to do less. Unfortunately, time, tor, mental nature, and relentless human intervention have affected all the wilderness enhancements they could request.
But it’s a curious, desolate tract patch. There continues to be cultivation – due to the fact there’s nevertheless groundwater very close to the surface. “We hit the water on this patch at simply 15 feet below,” says P. Honnureddy, Linganna’s son. Borewells won’t find water before 500-six hundred toes in a great deal of Anantapur. In elements of the district, they’ve breached the 1,000-foot mark. Yet here is water gushing out of a four-inch borewell as we talk. That lots of water, so near the surface, on this hot and sandy patch?
“That complete location lies in a prolonged riverbed,” explains Palthuru Mukanna, a farmer from a nearby village. What river? We can see nothing. “They constructed a dam [around five] many years ago, 25-30 kilometers from Honor, on the Vedavathi river that ran through here. As a result, our stretch of Vedavathi (a tributary of the Tungabhadra – additionally called the Aghari) sincerely dried up.”
“That is indeed what came about,” says Malla Reddy of the Ecology Centre (of Anantapur’s Rural Development Trust) – few realize this place in addition to he does. “And the river can be dead; however, over centuries, it helped create an underground reservoir of water that is now being relentlessly mined and extracted. At a fee which indicators a coming catastrophe.”
That catastrophe wouldn’t be long in coming. “There changed into hardly ever an unmarried bore twenty years in the past,” says V.L. Himachal, forty-six, a farmer with 12.Five acres within the desertified location. “It was all rainfed agriculture. Now, there are among 300-four hundred borewells in approximately 1,000 acres. And we strike water using 30-35 ft, now and then higher.” That’s one borewell to every three acres, or much less.
That’s high density, even for Anantapur, which, as Malla Reddy factors out, “has close to 270,000 borewells, even though the carrying capability of the district is 70,000. And almost half of this huge range is dry this year.”So what are the borewells in these badlands for? What’s being cultivated? What sticks out in the patch we’re exploring is not even the district’s all-pervasive groundnut crop but bajra. That millet is grown right here for seed multiplication, not for intake or the market for seed agencies who have contracted the farmers for this job. You can see male and lady plant life laid out well in adjoining rows. The businesses are developing a hybrid from one-of-a-kind traces of bajra. This operation will take a brilliant deal of water. What’s left of the plant after seed extraction will be at satisfactory function fodder.
“We get Rs 3,800 according to quintal for this seed replication painting,” says Pujari Linganna. That seems low, given the labor and care worries – and the truth that the organizations will sell the seeds of the one to the same class of farmers at very high costs—another cultivator on this patch, Y.S. Shantamma, says her circle of relatives gets Rs three,seven-hundred a quintal. Shantamma and her daughter Vandakshi say the trouble of cultivating here isn’t always water. “We even get water inside the village even though we haven’t any piped connection at home.” Their headache is the sand that – except for the huge volume already exists – can rapidly accumulate. Trudging through even quick distances on sand several feet deep can be tiring.
