Oh, for the rainy days

But don’t bank too hard on the monsoon

Amidst the pervading gloom on the economic front, there are welcome signs that India might have a normal monsoon for the fourteenth straight year. The South-West monsoon — which brings 80 per cent of the country’s annual rainfall — is also expected to hit Kerala’s coast as usual in the first week of June. A normal monsoon is a good augury for higher grains production during the Kharif season. Higher rural incomes boost industrial demand. All of this should dispel the blues, especially on industrial output which is slumping by the month. But a normal monsoon does not necessarily imply such favourable outcomes. For starters, its spatial and temporal spread is highly uneven despite normal overall rainfall. For such reasons, India’s grain output was expected to decline in 2000-2001 from the record level of 1999-2000. Industry’s fortunes remained lacklustre. Yet the forecast of a normal monsoon unfailingly lifts official hopes.

There is, however, no warrant for such complacency. The agrarian economy of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh might be resilient to the vagaries of the raingods, thanks to canal-fed irrigation facilities. But this cannot be said of peninsular India, which still depends on the rains not just for grain production but also drinking water. Despite a normal monsoon, there will be regions experiencing severe rainfall deficiency. This uneven spatial spread raises the spectre of droughts in such regions. 71 districts in the country received deficient monsoon rainfall in 1999 and 2000. The reservoir levels in parts of Gujarat, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh were much lower when compared to the average of the last ten years. Groundwater tables are also drying up, thanks to inappropriate cropping patterns. These realities call for better water-management practices, including rain harvesting; the creation and optimal utilisation of irrigation facilities and other conservation strategies. These measures are imperative regardless of another normal monsoon this year. A sense of urgency rather than complacency is the need of the moment — an urgency that may sink in if a monsoon failure for two back-to-back years is explicitly planned for. The rainfall monsoon forecast is usually made in end-May when the central India temperatures are factored in. The fact that the Indian Meteorological Department has stuck its neck out earlier testifies to its growing confidence in predicting the monsoon. But let that not be cause for smugness.