A farmer walks through a dry, cracked paddy-field on the outskirts of
Jammu. The monsoon, which usually starts to arrive in June, has barely
come at all this year
A looming drought is manageable. Long-term changes to the monsoon might be catastrophic
The dizzying midday heat of India’s northern plains cracks the earth.
Farmers slump on the charpoys on which they sleep outdoors. It should
be raining, yet the sky is clear. Prithi Singh, lean and wrinkled, says
his entire rice crop has withered, along with fields sown for fodder.
After two summers of erratic and delayed monsoons, this year the
rains simply failed. Mr Singh cannot afford to pay for a borehole,
generator and diesel to reach ever-diminishing groundwater. Farmers
always grumble. But Mr Singh has lost half of his annual income of
50,000 rupees ($890) and now depends upon his crop of winter wheat.
Another farmer nearby fears he must sell his land to pay accumulated
debts to moneylenders.
The monsoon months, June to September, bring three-quarters of
India’s annual rainfall.
Official studies show it to be erratic in four
out of every ten years. Yet farmers rarely get any useful warning of
shortfalls. As recently as late June, India’s meteorologists were
predicting a normal monsoon. Punjab and Haryana, two north-western
agricultural states, now say rains are about 70% below average. Six
western states have issued drought warnings. The government in Delhi
says it may soon offer emergency help.
The country remains predominantly rural: over 600m out of 1.24
billion Indians rely directly on farming. Nearly two-thirds of Indian
fields are fed only by rain. A one-off drought is tolerable. Rural
job-creation schemes have lifted incomes for the poorest. Food prices
have only started to creep up. Granaries are overflowing, thanks to
recent bumper crops.
What is disturbing, though, are tentative signs of long-term change
to the summer rains. A less stable monsoon pattern would be harder to
predict. It would arrive late more often, yield less water, become more
sporadic, or dump rain in shorter, more destructive bursts (which
happened two years ago in Pakistan, where the Indus basin disastrously
flooded). The concerns of experts about the monsoon long predate today’s
dry spell.
Too little is known about summer weather systems on the subcontinent.
India is short of observation stations, weather planes, satellites,
climate scientists and modellers. The government and foreign donors are
scrambling to make amends. But even with better data, monsoons are
ill-understood once they leave the sea or low-lying land. At altitude,
notably, for instance, approaching the Himalayas, it is far trickier to
grasp just how factors such as wind direction, air pressure, latent
heating and moisture levels interact to deliver monsoon rains.
One trend looks clear: India has grown warmer over the past six
decades. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas, and orchards in the
range’s valleys are being planted on ever-higher slopes in search of a
temperate climate. Crops in the northern grain belt, notably wheat, are
near their maximum tolerance to heat, and so are vulnerable to
short-term blasts of higher temperatures. North India’s cities are also
growing hotter.
How more warmth affects the monsoon is not straightforward. A land
mass heating faster than the oceans will, in theory, draw in more
moisture to produce heavier monsoons. Yet the reverse appears to be
happening. Specialists who met in February in Pune, in Maharashtra
state, reported a 4.5% decline in monsoon rain in the three decades to
2009.
India’s leading climate modeller, R. Krishnan, of the Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, points to a study showing a
“steady decline” in rainfall on the Western Ghats, which run down the
west coast. A Japanese model that he has applied to southern India
predicts that a still more rapid decline in rainfall is likely.
Such a fall may matter little for states such as Kerala in the south,
which gets a monthly drenching of 50 centimetres (20 inches) during the
wet season. But Mr Krishnan notes other changes, notably evidence that
far fewer depressions have formed in the Bay of Bengal, off India’s east
coast, in recent summers. Since these help drive rain to India’s arid
northern plains, he concludes that “there is every reason to be
concerned about the monsoon.”
Explanations exist for some of this. One theory is that a growing
mass of particulates, such as coal dust and biomass (from the widespread
use of cow dung as fuel, for instance) in the air above India, now
hinders rainfall. Timothy Lenton, a climate scientist at the University
of
Exeter, argues that such pollution could trigger wider instability in
the monsoon.
Yet a decline in average rainfall may not be the main worry. Experts
who met in Delhi in May to discuss climate-induced “extreme events” in
India suggest that likelier threats include more short and devastating
downpours and storms, more frequent floods and droughts, longer
consecutive dry days within monsoons, more rapid drying of the soil as
the land heats, and a greater likelihood that plant and animal diseases
might spread.
It does not bode well for farmers, or for crammed cities with poor
sewerage and other rotten infrastructure. Slums and coastal cities look
especially vulnerable. Mumbai was overwhelmed in 2005 when nearly a
metre of rain was dumped on the city in 24 hours.
Such events will happen more often, the highest official in the
country’s environment ministry warns. He wants urgently to bring about a
big increase in insurance schemes that spread weather-related risks.
Rajendra Pachauri, who leads the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, worries that India is not yet even seriously
debating the new threats. He says it is ill-prepared for floods and
droughts “that are now considered once-in-every-20-years events, but
will be happening once in two years”.
The data harvest
The most pressing need is to gather and analyse data. This month
Indian scientists and foreign partners launched a five-year “monsoon
mission” to develop climate models for the region. India’s government is
beginning to act, by setting up new Doppler radar stations to track
weather systems over mountains. It is launching a new plane to fly into
cyclones to study their behaviour. Better still, India and its
neighbours could start sharing weather data, comparing ground and
satellite observations, for example.
More can be done elsewhere, too. Most obviously, even the poorest
farmers could work together better to store rainwater, for instance in
ponds and tanks, rather than praying for the skies to open. The share of
India’s farmland that is irrigated could roughly double, officials say.
Huge scope exists to reduce losses through evaporation and leakage from
shoddy irrigation systems.
More sophisticated farmers are getting better informed. One Indian
firm, Weather Risk, sells forecasts to some 75,000 subscribers, mostly
farmers across 15 states. Each pays just 30 rupees a month for the
information the firm supplies. It looks worthwhile. Sonu Agrawal of
Weather Risk notes growing demand for detail on highly localised
conditions and short-term rain and hail forecasts. Demand for crop
insurance is also rising.
Mr Agrawal and others remain sanguine about today’s dry patch,
calling it typical of the sort of droughts that often show up in
historic data stored by insurance firms. But given great gaps in
knowledge about the monsoon, and uncertainties over climate change, the
need for more accurate and complete data seems pressing. Studying the
late rains this year will not help Prithi Singh and his parched plot
today. But clarifying which, if any, trend poses the greatest threats to
farmers like him could turn out to be one of India’s most important
tasks.
Monsoon rains pick up afresh in central India
Monsoon rains have picked up in strength over the hilly regions (not plains) of northwest India and parts of central India.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) update said that rains were
reported from Orissa, west Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh during the 24 hours ending Monday
morning.
HEAVY RAIN
A weather warning valid for the next two days said that heavy rainfall
may occur at one or two places over Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand,
Chhattisgarh and Orissa. The alert is valid for a single day (Tuesday)
for East Rajasthan, Vidarbha and Madhya Pradesh.
An extended outlook valid until Friday said that thundershowers would
lash many places over the western Himalayan region, Uttar Pradesh, the
west coast, east and north-east India. The rains are expected to be
subdued over south interior peninsular India. Meanwhile, the cumulative
rain deficit for the country as a whole stayed at 21 per cent as on
Saturday.
DEFICIT AT 21%
North-west India (-39 per cent) and the peninsula (-22 per cent)
continued to be the worst hit. East and north-east India too has fallen
back to double-digit figures (-10 per cent). Central India, which has
come under a few of the latest surges of rain, has brought down the
deficit to 20 per cent.
More rains have been forecast for the region over the next few days, to
the near-total exclusion of both north-west India and interior
peninsula.
The west coast, as usual, could be the sole exception. Scattered showers
are also likely for the state of Gujarat, says an outlook by the US
National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
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