India wilts as monsoon fears grow

By M H Ahssan

India could be staring at an imminent drought. It's not the delayed national budget, but the specter of a delayed - or, in large measure, denied - monsoon that's giving everyone sleepless nights. The Indian Meteorological Department has stopped short of baneful predictions in an economically stressful year - mindful of the political implications - but the signs are dire.

It has been a heart-breaking June, with the fabled wet wind from the southwest absent in most regions normally on its itinerary. The northern plains are bone dry, with temperatures regularly touching the mid-40s in centigrade. They are the last port of call for the complex, mobile weather system which usually arrives there in July after drenching the vast swathes of peninsular India in June. But the monsoon has not even kept this date, for a number of reasons.

The monsoon season had an ominous start. In May, a spoiler developed in the Bay of Bengal in the shape of Cyclone Aila. Its low pressure core sucked off huge volumes of moisture from the incipient monsoon system building up off the Arabian Sea coast in the southwest, pouring it down in torrential buckets over the eastern seaboard states of Orissa and West Bengal. The residual moisture was funneled up into India's northeast, which saw rains a week or so ahead of schedule.

In the southwest and over the peninsula, the delicate monsoon never really recovered. It mostly hovered around the windward areas of the Western Ghats, the Malabar and Konkan coasts proper, as if hesitating to make an ingress into the mainland because it didn't have enough wind in its sails.

By the end of June, the rains were estimated at 54% below normal levels in these parts, with the deficit reaching 75% in central India. Desperation has began to show, with the state of Andhra Pradesh readying for cloud-seeding and some analysts gloomily offering el-Nino as a possible cause. Those capable of seeing patterns beyond the rational, of course, sought refuge in prayers and rituals, the most exotic instance being the marriage of two frogs organized in Nagpur to propitiate the gods.

At this point, the government finally thought it fit to say something. In a sort pre-emptive measure, it officially downgraded the 2009 monsoon to 93% of normal. This is a "below normal" figure - a cautious trimming of the "near normal" 96% forecast in April.

According to data collected since the 1940s, "normal" is 890 millimeters for the whole season. This naturally varies in different parts of India - which allows for the co-occurrence of bounty and scarcity.

The current reading is that, since June accounts for less than one-fifth of this total, central India may recover in the latter part of the season. What is really worrisome is that India's northwestern foodgrain belt, falling in the states of Haryana and Punjab, is likely to be worst hit. The prediction is that it will get only 81% of the long-term average for the region. That is not counting the 5% to 8% error level which could bring the rainfall level down to 73% of the normal.

The fear of drought - it would be the first in seven years - looms large. With power and water scarcity setting in, tempers in the cities are soaring almost in tandem with the heat.

After the predictions were made public, the first knee-jerk reaction came from Punjab. The state banned the use of air-conditioners in government offices, boards and corporations - despite the sweltering heat - so eight hours of uninterrupted power could be supplied to the farm sector. Some states have begun advertising to persuade farmers to switch crops and are even inviting tenders for cloud-seeding. The government is trying to keep things calm. Agriculture Secretary T Nanda Kumar has acknowledged the concerns but has insisted there is no reason to panic yet. A delayed monsoon could still make up for the loss.

The monsoon, which runs from June through September, is such a big thing in India that a bad year has the potential to topple governments. Even now, 60% of Indian farmland is dependent on rains, not irrigation. It goes beyond the economic, the imprint goes into the very socio-cultural make-up of a nation. From classical culture to kitsch Bollywood romance, nothing is untouched by the the unfailingly iconic moment of the arrival of the rains.

Its failure to arrive, then, is a soul-killer. The image of the ubiquitous poor farmer scanning the skies for a sign of the first dark cloud, framed against a parched piece of land with as many cracks as there are on his face, is both a subject of cliche and a matter of all-too-mundane reality. Governments of India dread nothing more than a bad monsoon. On the scale of enormity, it is no less huge than terrorist attacks or internal turmoil. For economists, who ply a predictive trade as risk-prone as that of weathermen, it's a built-in uncertainty in their forecasts. Their permitted margin of error.

Scientific monsoon prediction in India is an old game. The Met Department was the first national weather service in the world to start operational monsoon prediction work in 1886. This was when a British officer-cum-researcher used the relationship between winter Himalayan snow cover and the monsoon to make predictions. Forecasting the quantum of rainfall for the whole season was found useful for planning purposes. For farmers now, official word on intra-seasonal phenomena such as onset and withdrawal of the monsoon cycle is crucial for planning.

In a nutshell, a truant monsoon plays havoc with the kharif (rain-dependent, summer) crops. The implications can be better understood when seen against what are otherwise mundane statistics - 60% of India's 1.1 billion population survives on agriculture. That they account for only a fifth of India's national income only underlines the peril-ridden nature of their economics.

A dry June means kharif sowing is badly affected as it needs good rains for at least 15 days of June spilling over to July. Kharif crops like paddy, sugarcane, groundnuts, maize and pulses have a significant bearing on the country's food security, while others like cotton shape rural incomes. The spate of suicides by debt-ridden farmers in the past few years was highest in peninsular India's cotton areas.

This is, still, part of the problem. As poor rains lower agricultural output, in a chain effect they will also raise food prices and dent rural demand. Not to speak of the impact it would have on corporate profitability and market sentiment. The corporate sector wants the government to take corrective measures, if there's a problem at hand, so that food prices can be kept in check. Even the prime minister's office is monitoring the reluctant march of the monsoon. The state governments have been called for a meeting on Thursday to thrash out a contingency plan. There's obviously no time to lose.

A drought would affect the central government's finances on both the revenue and expenditure sides. Reduced rural demand in turn impacts industrial demand and consequently growth. Lower collections of all major taxes ranging from personal income to corporate, excise and even customs is a natural corollary. India's relative immunity to the global meltdown was attributed to its large domestic economy - in particular its hitherto under-appreciated rural component, whose robustness, being more insulated from world trends, came to the rescue of the more glamorous cities. It is this sector that gets directly hit by a bad monsoon.

On the other side, there would also be more pressure on the government's social welfare schemes. Drought would most certainly increase demand for the rural employment guarantee scheme and other sops may also be necessary. Besides, the government has promised a National Food Security Bill that would statutorily require the supply of 25 kilograms of rice or wheat at 3 rupees (US$0.06) per kilogram to poor families - a measure that could push up the subsidy bill by millions of rupees. And all this is happening in a year when the government has little maneuverability to spend its way through the crisis.

Little wonder that Minister for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan has cautiously admitted, "The southwest monsoon from June to September is likely to be below normal. But we've July and August to make up for the deficit." In concrete terms, bad rains signifies trouble in states like Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Orissa, where farmers could face crop loss; in Kerala, Uttarakhand and Punjab it could result in shrinking of reservoirs that would affect power generation and release of water to irrigated tracts.

For instance, the Tehri hydroelectric power station in Uttarakhand supplies power to New Delhi and its hinterland. The water level in its reservoirs has shrunk to dangerously low levels - 741 meters against a normal level of 830 meters during monsoons. The Bhakra dam, the biggest hydroelectric project in northern India, has water flowing in from the mountains. Its reservoir levels remain lower than they were last season.

Elsewhere in the country, the situation is no better. The Central Water Commission has made it known that in 80% of the reservoirs, the water level is below the 10-year average for the season. What has compounded the problem is that there was no snow in the higher ranges and no rain in the lower Himalayan mountains. In other words, with snow-fed rivers too under stress, a grim rain scenario would only complicate matters.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has the toughest job ahead. Scheduled to place a budget before parliament on July 6, he's faced with the task of producing a document that can revive an economy hemmed in by a high budget deficit and a looming food crisis. Actual gross tax revenue already fell by 3% in 2008-09, adding to Mukherjee's troubles.

All in all, it's the kind of crisis management that could require the Manmohan Singh government - voted back to power partly because of the premier's much-touted economic skills and partly because of its welfarism - to empty its coffers and stretch its talent pool.