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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's farmers face harder life ahead, say latest studies -Max Martin

India's farmers face harder life ahead, say latest studies -Max Martin

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published Published on Apr 30, 2015   modified Modified on Apr 30, 2015
-Business Standard/ IndiaSpend.org

Complex changes in local and global weather patterns will have severe implications for India's 600 million farming community

The unseasonal rain and erratic weather unsettling the Indian farmer—and the nation’s agriculture, economy and politics—are no aberrations.

Extreme rainfall events in central India, the core of the monsoon system, are increasing and moderate rainfall is decreasing —as a part of complex changes in local and world weather—according to a clutch of Indian and global studies reviewed by IndiaSpend.

The stories of Indian farmers not only indicate changes over the past three years, as IndiaSpend recently reported, but longer-term patterns in India’s agricultural lifeline, the monsoons.

Even when the average seasonal monsoon figure appear to be normal, fluctuations in rainfall in a country with 56% of sown area rainfed, can cause extreme wet and dry local conditions with wide economic, employment and social implications: about 600 million Indians depend on agriculture in India.

A wide range of reasons—including low productivity of land, market failures, debts, pests and uncertain weather—have led to a farming crisis in India, and farmer’s suicides have become a serious humanitarian and political issue for more than a decade.

As the monsoons bring 85% of India’s precipitation—all the water that falls to the ground as rain, snow and hail—fluctuations and uncertainties in weather can have serious impacts on farming.

Over 60 years, monsoon rainfall declines, variability increases

The average total rainfall during the peak monsoon season of July and August has declined since 1951, but the variability of rain during these months has increased—deluges are more severe, and dry spells more frequent.

That is the finding of a 2014 Stanford University paper, which compares Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) data over two periods: 1951 to 1980, and 1981 to 2011.

“Our study focuses on multi-day wet and dry extreme events. We look at how often and for how long such events occur, and also examine their severity (intensity),” Deepti Singh, a graduate student and lead author of the Stanford study told IndiaSpend. “Our study shows that in the historical record for which we have good observations (about 60 years), we find significant changes in these characteristics—increase in the severity (or intensity) of wet spells and in the frequency of dry spells.”

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Business Standard/ IndiaSpend.org, 29 April, 2015, http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/for-india-s-farmers-harder-life-ahead-find-latest-studies-115042900153_1.html


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