Still waiting for the monsoon

It is India’s lot that it must look up to the skies every year by the end of May praying that the southwest monsoon rains of the June-September season will be adequate to make agriculture fruitful in most of the country.

All the advance signs are wrong this time with even the Andhra Pradesh-Telangana summer heatwave being attributed to the El Nino phenomenon. The two words, signifying a weather anomaly that leads to abnormal warming of the sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean, are the most dreaded in a meteorologist’s lexicon. Not only can the El Nino engender summer heat in the subcontinent, it can also have a negative effect on the monsoon.

With 2015 heading towards becoming the hottest year on record, we may have even more reason to fear global warming and its harmful effects on our climatic patterns, as well as on nature to endow us with sufficient rain to support irrigation.

India gets 80 per cent of its rain from the southwest monsoon. While meteorologists make early predictions every year saying it would be around normal, this year’s forecast has already been for a “below normal” monsoon, which means state governments have been warned about the possible need to get relief measures in place, fundamentally of drought-relief money for farmers dependent on rain to produce the food we eat.

With 83 per cent of India’s farmers classified as small or marginal, and 70 per cent of all farmers in India wholly dependent on rain for irrigation, the negative effects of a deficient monsoon hardly need to be stressed. If the worst fears of the El Nino phenomenon this year are not ill founded, the country may have to dip into its food reserves buffer. Fortunately, India has been self-sufficient in food for a few decades now, which essentially means one poor monsoon out of four or five is not thought of as a national catastrophe.

The meteorology department may be obsessed with guessing the date of the onset of the monsoon over Kerala, but the date is relatively insignificant compared to the amount of rainfall received over the season, and how widespread it is.

Given the erratic nature of rainfall distribution across India, predicting rainfall specific to any sub-region is still an inexact science, despite all the modernisation that the Indian Meteorological Department has gone through and its ready access to global weather databases.

If nature is not as generous as before, may be we are to blame as manmade degradation of Earth may have rendered her parsimonious. There is irony in the fact that in this day and age of scientific advances we still look up expectantly for nature’s bounty to help us produce food to feed a hungry nation of 1.2 billion people.