Taming India's waters

Sunil Amrith has spent eight years chatting with Tamil fishermen and internationally-known meteorologists and traversing dusty British archives as well as the sub-continent to research this book

Unruly Waters

Sunil Amrith

Allen Lane; 379 pages, Rs 799

Last week, when private weather forecasting agency Skymet predicted that the monsoon could be below normal this year, the country went into a tizzy. Given that Indian agriculture continues to depend largely on rains for irrigation, a poor monsoon augurs everything from farmer distress and rising food prices to sluggish markets and higher food imports. This is why Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters  is a timely book. As climate change is causing increasingly more erratic monsoons and more extreme weather phenomena than ever before, his painstakingly researched treatise establishes a link