Just a few weeks ahead of the announcement of 2011 monsoon rainfall forecast by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the country’s apex agricultural research body has stated that the IMD’s predictions are of little avail for crop planning. Considering the diverse pattern of rainfall and recurring droughts in different parts of the country, the IMD should issue area-specific forecasts to help tailor crop plans according to anticipated weather conditions.
“The IMD forecasts on monsoon rains are too general for using in planning for alternative production strategies in the event of monsoon failure in a particular area like a district,” the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has said in its Annual Report 2010-11 presented to Parliament in the recently concluded budget session.
Changes in crop plans require timely supply of seeds and other inputs for the alternative crops. For this, the IMD needs to improve its capacity to provide ‘credible, usable and specific’ forecast on monsoon rainfall at disaggregate level like a large district.
Maintaining that the monsoon fails in some part of the country or another almost every year, the report has suggested that early warning systems need to be put in place for drought prediction.
The ICAR’s analysis of long-term monsoon rainfall trends has indicated that all states, barring the north-eastern ones, can expect a drought at least once in every five years. The most drought-prone areas in the country which experience drought once in every two-and-half years are west Rajasthan, Rayalaseema, Telangana, Haryana, Chandigarh and Delhi.
The other, only marginally less drought-prone areas, visited by this natural menace once every three years, include east Rajasthan, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and west Uttar Pradesh. Drought frequency of once in every four years has been observed in north-interior Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Vidarbha.
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The north-east is the only region where monsoon failures are not too common. The states like Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura experience drought only once in 15 years.
However, many of these states faced drought-like situation last year.
The report has also observed that, besides the total amount of rainfall, the distribution of rains is also important in determining crop production. There have been instances of better-than-normal crop output in rain-deficit years and also of below normal production in high rainfall years.
At the same time, however, the effect of the monsoon failure is now felt more strongly than before, the ICAR has maintained. It has attributed this to rising stress on available water resources. Both short-term and long term strategies are needed to combat monsoon failures and maintain farm production activity during droughts.
Agricultural scientists have developed new varieties of crops like rice, coarse cereals, pulses and oilseeds which take less time to grow and can also withstand drought. Alternative crop plans for different rainfall regimes in different agro-ecological settings have also been developed. “But such options can be effectively implemented only if reliable information is available on rainfall and its distribution in different periods in disaggregated geographical regions,” the ICAR report has maintained.