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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Drought fears
-The Hindu Business Line

Both the Centre and States need to be prepared for the possibility in peninsular India

The bad news is that the met department’s pessimistic monsoon forecast — of it being 7 per cent less than the long-period average (LPA) — is turning out to be right. The monsoon started off with much promise in June, finishing the month with a 16 per cent surplus and kharif sowing doing well, but since then things have changed. A 5 per cent deficit by the end of July widened in August, and today it stands at 9 per cent for the whole country. What’s worse, this all-India number masks a 20-59 per cent deficiency in 14 out of 36 meteorological sub-divisions, covering Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. The normal and excess regions are confined to Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and West Bengal. Analysts have pointed to the possibility of jowar, maize, cotton, soyabean and tur being affected. The fact that the shortfall has so far occurred in the dryland regions of peninsular India, regions already linked with acute farm distress, is further cause for concern. In 2000-01, an 11 per cent deficiency in peninsular India against 8 per cent for the entire country led to a serious dip in crop output. However, a 22 per cent all-India shortfall in 2009-10 did not impact output as much, perhaps because the deficiency was just 4 per cent in peninsular India, while the irrigated north-western region bore the brunt with a 36 per cent rainfall decline. While rainfall within the next two weeks can salvage the sown crop, the Centre must be prepared for crisis management in the Deccan plateau and make its own assessment of the damage. Claims made by States (Karnataka has declared 98 taluks drought-hit) must be verified at the earliest and ‘drought monitoring cells’ activated without political differences leading to delays in declaring areas drought-hit.

While the onus of drought preparedness largely lies with the States, the Centre should work with them to promote short-duration crops such as sorghum and pulses where the soil has the requisite moisture. The States should set up fodder camps and embark on water conservation on a war footing. Where crop loss seems inevitable, the focus should be on implementing comprehensive weather-based crop insurance schemes — the Centre has a major role to play here — rather than resorting to knee-jerk doles.

Drought management also calls for a shift in cropping patterns away from paddy and sugarcane towards coarse grains and pulses. This is best done by hiking support prices more in the case of the latter than the former, as Karnataka has done. However, a shift towards sustainable practices calls for marketing reforms. Above all, the availability of water sources is the best insurance against drought — which calls for conserving aquifers, tanks and ponds to offset any dip in reservoir levels. These levels are particularly low in South India where just 35 per cent of storage capacity is filled. A holistic approach is called for, to manage what is as much a manmade problem as a natural one.