Let 100 monsoons bloom

Though the Bangalore-based Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulations (CMMACS), a government body, has for years been issuing monsoon forecasts by using its experimental prediction model, its actions have seldom raised the kind of controversy kicked up this year. The provocation this time is that the CMMACS has predicted largely poor monsoon rainfall, except in August, to the dislike of the ministry of the science and technology.

As a result, the ministry has lost little time in asking the CMMACS not to go to town with its forecasts. This naturally raises eyebrows, because the CMMACS projections have been at variance with the official monsoon prediction issued by the India Meteorological Department.

The department has projected near-normal monsoon rainfall during the entire season, and in the country as a whole. The government may also have been provoked because the stock and commodity markets, as also trade and industry, took the CMMACS forecast more seriously than the IMD's.

The issue to ponder is whether research organisations should have the freedom to make public the findings of their research, without being peer-reviewed or published in a research journal of repute.

In the case of public sector research organisations, this issue automatically gets extended to whether they should seek the prior permission of their parent departments for doing so.

One expected the science and technology minister, the redoubtable Kapil Sibal, to offer some clarifications on these issues when he chose to respond publicly to the controversy during a Press conference last Friday.

Unfortunately, his comments were of little help. For, while upholding the CMMACS' right to make its research findings public, he chose to put a rider by maintaining that the right to decide how to disseminate this information belonged to the parent department and not to the CMMACS. This is tantamount to tacit, but distinct, denial of the right that has been conceded.

Everyone recognises that monsoon prediction is a sensitive issue as it can influence the market and the public sentiment, with obvious repercussions. But the same sensitivity applies to the projections made by other official agencies, including the IMD.

Of course, this year the CMMACS prediction does not seem to hold, at least for the month of June for which it had projected a whopping 34 per cent rainfall deficiency. The actual deficiency has turned out to be only 15 per cent.

But the IMD's projections, too, go awry often enough. Besides, Indian agencies are not the only ones engaged in monsoon prediction. Many international organisations have also been doing so and their predictions are available in the public domain.

Under the circumstances, it seems futile to try to muffle public sector research bodies or force them to issue government-dictated projections. The best approach would be to put before the public the entire gamut of information available on this subject so that people can draw their own conclusions, perhaps by balancing the different forecasts (much as stock investors assess analysts' forecasts on corporate performance).