Drought again

With the Met office holding out no hope of any tangible revival of the monsoon, at least till July 25, fears of the 2002 drought being repeated are being aired more loudly.

That year, too, it was primarily a dry July (49 per cent deficient rainfall) that wreaked havoc. This time too, the pre-monsoon showers were plentiful; but the monsoon dried up by July in many parts of the country.

Fortunately, the extent of the area affected and the severity of the drought thus far are much less than in 2002. The worst-hit tracts are Rajasthan, western Madhya Pradesh, Vidharba, Marathwada, Telengana, Jharkhand and the north-western agricultural belt comprising Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh.

The rest of the country is more or less okay so far, with a large part of the north-east being submerged with flood waters. The rainfall deficiency in the Punjab-Haryana-west UP belt is not of much concern from the agricultural standpoint, thanks to irrigation, so the area facing major agricultural failure is about one-third of the country, against more than two-thirds in 2002.

But that is only part of the problem. There are other repercussions flowing from the erratic monsoon""on hydel power generation; increased rural demand for power and diesel; drop in demand for farm inputs, including fertiliser and farm machinery; erosion of rural demand for consumer durables; and of course the impact on GDP growth.

Tractor sales have already dwindled, say news reports, and the share prices of many agro-related companies have taken a beating. The recharge of reservoirs has declined in many areas. At least six major reservoirs""two each in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, and one each in UP and Madhya Pradesh""have no usable water.

Besides, crop planting lags far behind schedule in the rain-deficient belt, requiring the regular crops to be replaced by relatively low-yielding and low-value alternative crops. This will result in a significant drop in both the volume and value of farm output.

Under these circumstances, the government needs to gear up to tackle the effects of the drought. The major role has to be played by state governments, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement in Parliament that the government will wait till the end of July to initiate drought relief measures suggests a lack of urgency on the part of the administration.

This aside, the monsoon failure also points to the failure of the Met office's new monsoon prediction models; these had projected a 100 per cent normal monsoon for the season as a whole, and 98 per cent for July.

These models were adopted last year and have started faltering in their second year of use, unlike the previous 16-parameter regression model that held its ground for close to a decade.

The Met office should, therefore, start searching for new models to forecast the monsoon more accurately and comprehensively, with assessments of rainfall distribution over time and space.