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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Apr 14, 2016, 09:29 AM IST
The predictions of an “above-normal” monsoon by the Indian Meteorological Department and private forecaster Skymet has come as a huge relief for the entire country. After two years of drought, the forthcoming monsoon season has become very crucial. This is the first time since 1999 that the IMD has predicted an above-normal monsoon.
The monsoon is considered “normal” if the rainfall received is 96-104 per cent of the long period average (LPA). The LPA is the average rainfall received between the months of June and September over the past 50 years. This year, the IMD has predicted a 94 per cent chance that the rainfall could be 106 per cent of the LPA. In 2014 and 2015, the actual rainfall dipped to 88 and 86 per cent respectively of the LPA, against initial forecasts of 96 and 93 per cent for these two years. The monsoon is critical for India in several ways. Agriculture in India is largely rain-fed and though agriculture contributes just 13 per cent of India’s GDP, it employs 49 per cent of the country’s workforce, thus making its performance more critical to the Indian economy than other sectors. The two successive droughts have also reduced ground water availability and depleted over-ground reservoirs and rivers, putting a strain on drinking water availability.
However, the positive forecast should not drive the central and state governments into a state of complacency. Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh has already announced that the country can expect a spurt in agricultural production again. The media are also exulting that the rains would alleviate rural distress, boost rural incomes and consumption demand even while augmenting food supplies and keeping inflation under check, thereby giving the cushion for the RBI to further reduce interest rates. It is remarkable how the focus shifts to good news even when most parts of the country continue to combat drought, water scarcity and above-normal summer temperatures. The danger is that the lessons are not being learned from the past two years of hardships and there is likelihood things will go the way they were before the two drought years. There is an urgent need to put in place water management techniques across villages, towns and cities so that the water from the rains are collected and stored to last an entire year. India receives an estimated 2.4 trillion cubic metres of rainfall every year, but only a fraction of it is saved through water conservation techniques and much of it is lost to evaporation or surface run-off.
Civic bodies hardly have the expertise or the resources to pursue such activities and it is incumbent upon central and state governments to hand-hold them. For long, the refrain among MGNREGA enthusiasts has been that it should be used for rural asset creation like watersheds, percolation tanks, check dams, desilting existing tanks and creating new tanks and ponds rather than viewing merely as a rural job guarantee scheme. In cities, a major source of water wastage is leaky water pipes and poor sewage treatment. Reforms are also needed in agriculture through a change in cropping patterns and relying more on less-wasteful watering techniques like drip irrigation. Paddy and sugarcane are two water-intensive crops whose cultivation can no longer be sustained in places where groundwater levels have depleted. These two crops also depend on massive largesse from the state in the form of support prices, procurement mechanism and free electricity to pump water. Thus, political interests are also responsible for the perpetuation of undesirable or wasteful cropping patterns. Ultimately, a good monsoon does not automatically erase the losses suffered by farmers in the past two years due to crop loss and debt. Farmers will soon start sowing the kharif crop. The government must lose no time to propose changes in cropping patterns and creating rain harvesting structures.
