 Look, in the last 30 years, all the beats that cover, and this is why I am saying they are not mainstream, all the beats that cover ordinary people, that cover the social sector, that cover society have disappeared from the media, all of them have disappeared, okay. When I joined journalism, September 20th, 1980 in UNI in this city, I remember because that was the day the Iran-Iraq war broke on my first shift. That every newspaper in this country had a labour correspondent. There isn't such a creature, not even the fossil of a labour correspondent can be found in the media now. There is something very profiting on my first day in journalism. I watched a punch out between two veteran correspondents fueled by high spirits and you know what happened? The business correspondent beat the living daylights out of the labour reporter who promptly went extinct after that and was never been heard of since. There is a moral to that story somewhere, alright. So you have no labour correspondent. You do not have an agriculture correspondent in any newspaper in the country. What the guys who are called agriculture correspondents cover the agriculture ministry. They cover the minister. They can't tell you a cabbage from a cucumber. They don't go to the field. They don't cover the mandi. 30 years ago, you started journalism in a newspaper like the Hindu, you had to start in a district. You had some, you had to go and cover the mandi, the market, the transportation, all of this you had to do. That was an agriculture correspondent. They still didn't do anything much about people. I myself do not consider myself an expert on agriculture at all. I know something about it. I consider myself an expert on people who live off agriculture, which I think is quite another, it's another universe than scientific agriculture technique, which I cannot claim to be an expert on at all. But you have, so the old correspondents, they didn't cover people, but they covered the markets. They covered the mandi. They covered the crop. You know, they knew what the kharif was about. They knew what the rabbi was about. They knew whether it was going to fail or not. Yeah. Now, all you do is to listen to IMD and write about predictions of the monsoon. You don't cover the agriculture. Okay. Here's the deal. If you refuse to have a media that refuses to have an agriculture correspondent, a media that refuses to have a labor correspondent, what you are saying is that 75% of the Indian population do not make news. That is your statement. Yeah. You're saying they don't make news. It means that the media are not talking to 75% of the Indian population in any structured form. 2000 suicides, they'll go and talk. And they want to understand the thing because they have no context, they have no expertise. You will send out some kid who has no background in it not to be blamed, no training for that. If the census loses 3000 points in Mumbai, every daily newspaper will have its senior most business editor on Dalal Street in the next flight. Yeah. They have very, very, I mean, probably the young person in Mumbai would do much better than the business editor who spends all his time at corporate parties. But still they show us, there's a show of seriousness. So 75% of your population is excluded structurally from this. So you're not going to have that. It shows in the way you cover the water crisis. I'm sick of hearing this word drought. Tell you something. Number one, let's suppose you settle your Cauvery dispute to everybody's satisfaction. Do you think your water problem is over there? Forget it. The Cauvery Delta is in such a serious water crisis. And much of the water you're using in your agriculture is ground water. Yeah. When we say drought, please take note of this because as reporters, as journalists, please understand the media when they say drought are talking about meteorological failure. India's had according to me a hydrological drought for 15 years. Many regions have had a hydrological drought. You're having, you're approaching a ground water crisis. Tamil Nadu is already there, the largest, greatest over exploitation of ground water any known region anywhere with saline water now coming into all the bore wells. The idea that if the monsoon is good, the water problem is over is one of the stupidest, dumbest ideas you can have. You're not looking at what we are doing with the water that we do have. There are gigantic transfers of water taking place. Indian inequality stands out greatest in the water sector. Apart from incomes and assets. If you're looking at manifestations of inequality, you know, now people, now reporters who know something, who think something. By the way, I have to tell you that upon Manan, Sujith Dutta and a little after them myself, we were the first people with MAS doing MFILs to enter a new agency in this country. Everybody else was high school graduates and the editor-in-chief had a BCOM degree, I don't know what for, but it was BCOM. And yeah, I want to tell you that that social sciences degree, that the history degree that which I had made a hell of a difference, continues to make a hell of a difference to my journals. So that you, your job is also to be a bridge between the wealth and knowledge of social sciences and the lay public. That is also one of the most important tasks of journalism. And I'm finding say, suppose I go to an area and if I have some knowledge historically of the land relations, tenorial relations of that area, it makes a gigantic difference in the context it gives me for my stories. If I'm writing from a very feudal part of Bundelkhand, it makes a hell of a difference to know what was there before what you're seeing. Yeah. So that's one very important thing that there is no context and come back to water. Massive things are happening, massive gigantic transfers are taking place. Transfer from rural to urban, one, that's just one of five transfers. I live in Bandra, reclamation, Mumbai, or I get 24 hours water for the 31 years, for the 29 years I have lived there, I get 24 hours water. All my water, all the water of Mumbai comes from five lakes in the Adivasi areas of Tane district, Vaitharna, Tulsi, Vaishali, all our water comes from there. Around there, not a single Adivasi has a piped connection in his or her house, yeah. It hasn't moved forward in 30 years that more than 2-3% of them have got piped connections. They just don't, they just don't have it. So you are taking their water, it's their water. Times of India's Priyanka Kakotkar did an RTI last year. It showed Maharashtra's urban areas get 400% more water than Maharashtra's villages, though the water comes from the rural areas. So there's gigantic transfers of water and then within the cities and towns where it goes, by the way Mumbai, Tane, Pune account for three districts out of 36 consume 53% of Maharashtra's water. These are not noted agricultural districts, Mumbai and Pune, Tane is, yeah. So the bulk, here I am talking about drinking water and all kinds of stuff. Within the city, South Mumbai, Ghatkopar, Dharavi, the water per liter per person varies from 40, 50, 60 liters per person to 500, 600 liters per person as you go towards Malabar, Hill and Kapiray. Point is that your mainstream media is never going to cover the class and caste distinctions of water. It's not going to do that. And you need to know the caste distinction. Historically, water is, irrigation in this country is so strongly based on a caste geography. That's why the Dalits always are living on the outskirts of every village, not inside it. You'll also find as you go south, Dalit colonies are always on the southern outskirts of the village. The rationalization for that is Lord Yama dwells in the south. No good Hindu should sleep. Your grandma would tell you that. No good Hindu should sleep with her head to the south because Lord Yama feels the need for a snack, you're it. So you don't, so the south is a condemned place. Why? Most waters, most streams in these areas flow north to south. At the headwaters, the dominant caste, the upper castes, the midwaters, the intermediate castes, the tailwaters, the shudras and beyond that where there is no water, the Dalits. That is the caste geography. It changes suddenly and the rationalization of Yama also changes. If you go to Rajasthan where there is no bloody water and there is no river flowing, but there are winds flowing from west to east. So the Dalits are kept on the eastern outskirts of the villages. They kept on the eastern outskirts. They're all rigors and they're involved in flaying of hides. You know your nostrils should not be offended by such activity. So that's, the transfers are taking from, very basically from poor to rich water, from rural to urban, from agriculture to industry, from food crop to cash crop. Very, very important, extremely important. Gigantic transfers of water have taken place within agriculture. Now say in what you, the water you require for one acre of sugarcane, you can grow 12 to 15 acres of Jawar or Bajra. Yeah, 12 to 15 acres. One acre of sugarcane takes 18 million litres. That's 7 and a half Olympic swimming pools or 10 Boeing Dreamliners, whichever you prefer. And you keep in the state like Maharashtra, I'm not saying you shouldn't grow sugarcane. You need to grow it where you have the water for it. In the genetic plane they do have some, but you're going to rapidly run out of that water if you keep spreading cash crop stuff which is requiring more and more and more water and a lot of that based for export. So that's another. Another transfer is from poor people to industry. You know, standard media coverage is all those poor women standing in the, with their begging bowl out like that for the water, they're asked to pours for it when you go there, when the tanker has come. You know what the woman in Maratwada pays for that? Minimum 45 paisa litre. Standard as the scarcity sharpens that price moves upwards, 1 rupee per litre. In the same Maratwada, in the same Aurangabad, in the same Maratwada, 24 beer factories get 3 million, 3 to 5 million litres daily for 4 paisa litre. At the same time that those women, the poorest of poor women are paying 1 rupee a litre.