There is one thing synonymous with being Indian that spans both urban and rural India, and transcends the rich-and-poor divide: The annual watch and wait for the monsoon. It begins every year without fail as heat intensifies and the monsoon advances. Farmers wait desperately because they need rain at the right time for their crops. Without rain water, they cannot sow seeds. City managers wait around because by the beginning of each monsoon season, water levels in reservoirs that feed cities go precariously low. They need the rain to replenish the reservoirs. All of us wait, in spite of air-conditioning systems, for the relief that the rain would bring to us as we swelter in the scorching heat and dust. This is perhaps the only time when the entire country is united in its desperation. It cannot exhale till it rains.
But even as I write this, I think of three questions. One, is this phenomenon called the monsoon so important in every Indian’s life; how much do we really know about it; do we know why it rains; do we know that scientists are still squabbling over the definition of monsoon? The only definition they have is: Seasonal winds that blow in regular directions; and they get flummoxed when this changes. Do we know that our monsoon is more globalised than all of us, and that it is integrated and linked to the ocean current faraway in the Pacific, or the temperature of the Tibetan plateau, the Eurasian snow, or even the freshwater content in the Bay of Bengal? Do we know who the monsoon scientists are in India, and how they are desperately learning to chase this unpredictable and variable creature better as each day passes by? We don’t. Not really. We have been taught some science in school, but never in real life. It is not part of the usable knowledge, something that we think we need to know to survive in the world of today. But, we are wrong.
The grand old man of the monsoon in India, the late P R Pisharoty, would have told you that this annual event brings us rain for just about 100 hours in a 8,765-hour year, which means it is a challenge to manage it well. Environmentalist Anil Agarwal would have explained we need to understand the monsoon to comprehend how nature uses weak forces rather than the concentrated ones to do its work. Just think: It takes a very tiny temperature difference to carry as much as 40,000 billion tonnes of water from the oceans across thousands of miles to dump it as rainfall over India.
This lack of knowledge of nature’s ways is at the core of the environmental crisis, he would say. Consider again: Today we use concentrated energy sources like coal or oil that have created enormous problems like air pollution, locally, and climate change, globally. If we understood the ways of nature, we would have shifted to using weaker sources of energy, like solar power or rainfall without waiting for it to concentrate in rivers or in aquifers. “Humans have come to rely much more on concentrated water sources like rivers and aquifers in the last 100 years. But, heavy use of these sources is leading to their over-exploitation. In the 21st century, human beings will once again move to weaker water resources like rainfall,” said Agarwal. In other words, the more we understand the monsoons of our lives, the more we will know how to move from just unraveling nature to imitating its ways, thereby building a way of development that is sustainable.
Moving on to my second question: Do we know how to live without the monsoon? After some 60-odd years of Independence, and after considerable investment in creating surface irrigation systems, the bulk of Indian agriculture remains rain-fed. This literally means that farmers depend heavily on this extremely capricious and undependable God to sow, plant and harvest. But this is not even the complete picture. What is not said is that 60-80 per cent of the irrigated area is watered by groundwater — a resource that needs the rain to recharge and refill its supply. This is why every year as the monsoon progresses, from Kerala to Kashmir or Bengal to Rajasthan, hearts stop beating if it halts, slows or dies. Words such as low pressure and depressions are part of the Indian lexicon. The monsoon is, and will remain, India’s true finance minister.
Therefore, I believe, instead of looking to reduce dependence, we should celebrate our association with this rain creature — we should strengthen our engagement with the monsoon. Our monsoon lexicon must expand so that we harvest the rain, and save every drop of it where and when it falls.
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If we can do this, then we can also answer my third and the most painful question. How should we live and celebrate the rain that falls in our cities and on our fields? Today we cry when it does not rain and we weep when it does as rain brings floods and diseases in fields and causes traffic jams in cities.
The monsoon is a part of each of us. Now we have to make it real.