An article I found on the "Daily Mail" website about the monsoon:
Agriculture secretary raises red flag as monsoon proves elusive
By Savita Verma
PUBLISHED: 21:27 GMT, 21 July 2012 | UPDATED: 23:09 GMT, 21 July 2012
A worried Centre on Saturday took stock of the situation in the major raindeficient states as scanty monsoon rains so far stoked fears that the country was in the throes of a drought.
Drought conditions now extend to large swathes of the country, including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, where farmers are yet to sow crops.
'Large tracts of land are still unsown in these six states.
An Indian farmer and his son walking over their parched paddy field on the outskirts of Agartala (File photo)
But there is still time for sowing and if it rains sufficiently in August, farmers can still reap a good harvest. There is sufficient stock of seeds in these states for late sowing of crops,' Union agriculture secretary Ashish Bahuguna said. If it rains, that is.
The meteorological department is not very hopeful of a late revival of the monsoon, at least not over northwest India. Between June 1 and July 18, 76 per cent of India received scanty to low rainfall.
The Met department had first predicted 99 per cent monsoon rains this year, slashing it to 96 per cent afterwards.
Even that looks very lofty now. 'The north and northwest India such as Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, west Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have received insufficient rainfall.
The conditions over northwest India do not look good for now. Probably, we will not be able to make up for the deficiency,' Dr L.S. Rathore, director general of Indian Meteorological
Department, said. That's bad news.
Ten lakh hectares of farmland under kharif crops are yet to be sown in Karnataka. Maharashtra farmers are yet to sow crops on 8.65 lakh hectares. The pace of sowing has been affected in the Saurashtra and Kutch regions of Gujarat because of scanty rains.
In the entire state, only 35 per cent of the sowing area has been covered so far. If rains do not occur next week, groundnut and cotton sowing could be hit. Punjab is better off than the rest. Despite poor rains, farmers there have completed sowing, benefitting from the extensive groundwater irrigation facilities. In Haryana, sowing is complete in 70 per cent farmland.
But the harvest could be affected in areas under bajra cultivation in the southern region if it does not rain in the coming days. In Punjab and Haryana, the rain deficit so far is 71 per cent.
'It is a drought-like situation in many states.
Gradually, they will have to accept it. Look at the US. They have accepted the drought there.
The government here has already drawn up a contingency plan but are yet to officially declare a drought,' Devinder Sharma, a food and trade policy analyst, said.
When the rainfall deficit for the country is more than 10 per cent of normal and more than 20 per cent of the country's area is affected by drought conditions, the Centre declares a drought year.
But now it's too early to declare a drought. It could be declared only in August, agricultural scientists say. According to an agricultural scientist, the situation is bad but that lost ground can be recovered if the rains in the rest of the season are good. 'The major problem is in south Karnataka, west Rajasthan, Kutch and Maharashtra, where land is not irrigated. In these areas, farmers are still waiting to sow crops. Punjab and Haryana have good irrigation facilities,' B. Venkateswarlu, director of the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, said.
Severe drought conditions also extend to west Uttar Pradesh but luckily vast tracts of its farmland are irrigated. The rain shortfall in west Uttar Pradesh is 58 per cent; in west Rajasthan it is 59 per cent; in Maharashtra 37 per cent, in Kutch 74 per cent and in south Karnataka 51 per cent.
Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Chattisgarh and Assam have received good rains. Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh also received good rains last week. Venkateswarlu said losses were expected in coarse grains like maize, sorghum and bajra. The situation on rice cultivation would be clear only in the first week of August. Kharif crops have particularly suffered in northwest India as there were no pre-monsoon showers.
Generally, there are sufficient pre-monsoon rains before the end of June, which leads to the sowing of kharif crop such as paddy, pulses like arhar, moong, urad, lobhia and moth bean, bajra, maize and sugarcane. India typically receives 75 per cent of its annual rain from the June-September monsoon. More than half of the arable land in India, one of the world's biggest producers of cotton, rice, sugar and wheat, is rainfed.
The weather office publishes a forecast in April predicting how much rain will fall over the four months and whether the monsoon will be 'normal'. It does this by comparing sea temperatures, wind speeds and air pressure with data from the past 50 years. In June, the forecast is updated to give monthly rainfall figures for July and August - the main growing months - as well as seasonal figures for four broad regions.
Many of the weather office's long-range summer monsoon predictions last year were inaccurate. It also struggled to predict extreme weather events such as the drought in 2009 - a year when it had forecast normal monsoon rains.
There is a lot the IMD struggles to predict - when the rains will arrive throughout the country, where exactly they will fall, which parts will receive the most and how long they will last. Shortrange forecasts give more precision but offer only a five- to sevenday window into the future, which farmers say is too short.
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