JOIN USMahoba district, India: For the first time in his life, Jeevan Lal Yadav has been getting his wheat and vegetables from the market five miles away, rather than from his own farm. Jeevan, 43, has not been able to grow anything this past year on the five acres he cultivates here in the heart of northern India, parts of which are experiencing a severe drought.
He is one of millions struggling after a strong El Nino led to reduced rain from the southwest monsoons. Rainfall in 2015 from monsoons, which sweep over most of India from June to September, was 14 per cent below the average. The reduction was more than 40 percent in some areas, including India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, where Jeevan lives.
Because most Indians are farmers, and a majority relies entirely on the monsoon rains, a blow to the rainy season is devastating, rendering lives barely recognisable.
Instead of guarding his annual harvest against wild buffalo, as he has done for as long as he can remember, these days Jeevan sits among a crowd outside the door of the village headman, hoping to get picked for a public works programme that pays Rs 161 a day. His name is called every other day at best, he said.
“I’ve never seen something like this,” he said, outside his two-room mud hut in Thurat, a village of several hundred homes surrounded by dried ponds and mostly barren fields that in years past were green with a harvest of wheat and lentils at this time of year. “It’s all dry. I didn’t even sow the seeds.”
Compounding the effects of the El Nino-induced drought this past year is that much of India also suffered from mild El Nino in 2014 that reduced monsoon rainfall 12 per cent. D S Pai, deputy director general of the long-term monsoon forecasting division at the Indian Meteorological Department, said India predicted the blow to the summer monsoon, which had happened in previous El Nino years. Pai said his department worked with district officials to inform farmers by text message of long-term predictions and warned them about more immediate outbreaks of bad weather.