If facilitating crop planning was one of the motives for the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD’s) maiden winter season forecast, it has, by and large, been defeated. The IMD’s prognosis that temperatures almost all over the country could remain on the higher side of normal during this winter came rather late in the rabi season to allow any adjustment in cropping pattern to suit the projected weather conditions. By the beginning of December, when IMD released its first-ever temperature outlook for the cold season, the sowing of main rabi crops of wheat, gram and mustard was already more than halfway through. There is hardly any scope left now to replace normal crop varieties with those that can withstand heat. Given that the agricultural sector is still recovering from the impact of two successive droughts, the unfavourable weather during the current rabi season is the last thing the country could wish for.
Warmer winters invariably impact rabi crops adversely. Wheat, the key rabi cereal, is particularly sensitive in this respect. Studies in the northwestern wheat belt, where premature warming towards the end of winter has been noticed quite often in the last 10 years, have shown that every one-degree rise in temperature tends to slash the wheat yield by up to 10 per cent. Such a deprivation of wheat output is deemed especially worrisome this year because the government’s grain stockholding has dipped to a five-year low and prices are trending up. The prospects of a bumper wheat harvest this year have, in any case, been hurt to by various factors. These include the demonetisation-driven cash crunch in rural areas, the belated onset of sowing as a result of a delay in the kharif harvest, and the absence of night chill that is vital for good seed germination. The government, too, seems unsure whether the domestic wheat output will match the demand this year. It has, consequently, abolished the customs duty on wheat to encourage its imports, a move that has, predictably, been dubbed by farm organisations as anti-farmer. They have charged the government with deliberately depressing local prices ahead of crucial assembly polls in several states.
What needs to be borne in mind is that the adverse effect of weather on crops is normally more pronounced during two stages of their life cycle, the post-sowing seed germination phase and the pre-harvest grain development stage. Had IMD’s forecast been available well in advance of the sowing season, the anticipated temperature anomaly could have been taken care of by planting shorter-duration and heat-tolerant crop strains, which could complete their growing cycle before the temperature rose. Since that was not the case, the only remedy at hand now is to contain the damage through well-judged agronomic interventions. For this, wheat scientists would need to remain alert and come up with timely weather-based advisories to be conveyed quickly to farmers through extension agencies and other means of communication. The IMD would do well to learn lessons from this year’s experience and endeavour in future to put out its winter forecast preferably at the end of the monsoon season or, at least, well ahead of the commencement of rabi planting in October.