Scanty monsoon : The ecological challenges

N Munal Meitei *

Drought looming : The condition of Paddy field in Thoubal district :: last week of July 2012

In Manipur upto the fourth week of this July 2012, the state received only 64% of rainfall against the 78% of national records. With this rainfall, about 35% of our paddy fields could be cultivated and for the rest the farmers are still praying. The state is facing a drought like situation and the Govt. is yet to declare a drought prone state. Lack of other irrigation facilities in the state is again another factor to be blamed.

Now low rainfall has been experienced this year, but if all the months get less rain than normal, it would be a first since 1972. Monsoon comes from the Arabic word mousumi means seasonal. It plays an important role on the country's economy. The economy of the country depends upon Agriculture as around 70% of employments are generated either directly or indirectly from this sector. This is the major reason for the economic growth of India to depend on Monsoon.

Monsoon accounts for 80% of the rainfall in India. It starts from June and continues till September. In India, June to September monsoon rains is crucial to crop production as it support nearly 60% of the country. If the monsoon is good, it boost up the economy the country and helps in maintaining GDP growth. But if monsoon rains get delayed even by 15 days, it becomes a cause of worry for the government to maintain GDP growth.

But as per the estimates given by Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), rains this year in 2012 have not been so good till now. Rainfall in June already saw a 31% deficit and 82% of the country, including almost all the states in northern India and north-eastern states like Manipur. have received deficient or scanty rainfall. Monsoon was normal in 2010 and 2011 except 2009 but this year, it is doubtful again.

Rainfall in North India has been delayed and scanty and thus India's highest dam, the Bhakra Nangal, has reached a critical level There is a similar situation at other reservoirs also, which has worsened the power situation in almost all the Indian states. In Manipur also, the Shingda Dam and other reservoirs were much below the critical level.

Effects of Monsoon Rains

Monsoon rains has an impact on several crops of different states in India. Kharif crop gets affected due to the delay of rains. Rains also affect the production of rice, millet, sugarcane, oilseeds and cotton. As per the metrological department, this delayed in rains has badly affected the farming sector. Less rain affects the purchasing power in rural areas and contract demand for products and services. With the global recession still pertaining, India is depending on the domestic demand which mainly comes from rural India.

To reduce the dependency on monsoon, Indian government needs to take some action and provide improved infrastructure for the agricultural sector in the following budget and literate the farmers about the latest technologies and equipments to use, rather than depending on monsoon rains. For Manipur which has very good rainfall but exceptional to this year should also have a planned programme to face such eventualities in future.

How Monsoon occur?

The southwest monsoon is generally begins around the start of June and fade down by the end of September. The northern India and central Indian subcontinent heats up considerably during the hot summers, which causes a low pressure area over the northern and central Indian subcontinent. To fill this void, the moisture-laden winds from the Indian Ocean rush in to the subcontinent. These winds, rich in moisture, are drawn towards the Himalayas, creating winds blowing storm clouds towards the subcontinent.

The Himalayas act like a high wall, blocking the winds from passing into Central Asia, thus forcing them to rise. With the gain in altitude of the clouds, the temperature drops and precipitation occurs. Some areas of the subcontinent receive up to 10,000 mm of rain annually. This Monsoon is termed as Southwest Monsoon.

The Bay of Bengal Branch of Southwest Monsoon flows over the Bay of Bengal heading towards North-East India and Bengal, picking up more moisture from the Bay of Bengal. The winds arrive at the Eastern states including Manipur with large amounts of rain. Mawsynram, situated on the southern slopes of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, is the wettest places on the Earth.

After the arrival at the eastern Himalayas, the winds turn towards the west, travelling over the Indo-Gangetic Plain at a rate of roughly 1-2 Weeks per state pouring rain all along its way. June 1 is regarded as the date of onset of the monsoon in India, as indicated by the arrival in the southernmost state of Kerala. IMD has forecast the onset of Monsoon in Kerela this year on June 6, 2012.

Effects of Less Rainfall

The monsoon is widely welcomed and appreciated by city-dwellers as well, for it provides relief from the climax of summer heat in June. Due to the shortage in rainfall, prices of agricultural products went up and affected consumers drastically. Rising temperature also affected power supply of many states, which has also a reason for the increase in prices. It seems that this year too, the country will face the similar problems as were faced in 2009. It also causes shortage of water supply for production of power and electricity.

Electricity shortage has a strong effect on almost all sectors, which also causes delay in productions or increase in costing of products. There are three main impact of scanty Monsoon on lives and communities. First, the economic impacts include losses in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry. Many of these losses are then passed on to consumers in the form of higner commodity pricing. Next social impacts include increased chance of conflict over commodities, food security and water resources.

Other social impacts include abandonment of cultural traditions, changes in lifestyle, and increased chance of health risks due to poverty and hygiene issues. Finally, the environmental impacts of scanty Monsoon include loss in species biodiversity, migration changes, reduced air quality, and increased soil erosion. Once crops fail, famine can become a major problem.

Rainfall in Last Year

As per Met department in 2011 monsoon rains hit the country's southern coast two days ahead of expectations and helped to boost the country's output of grain and oil-seeds. Last year, many parts of Northern India witnesses monSoon rains and heavy rainfall which caused a lot of havoc and created a flood-like situation in several states. Rainfall in July, the wettest month of the monsoon season experienced less rainfall than expected.

Showers in August were forecast at 101 percent, according to the weather office and the seasonal rainfall in the country seen 97 per cent of the long period average at 635.1 mm against the normal of 652.3 mm.

Why exceptional low rainfall this year?

Even as the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh along with President elect and former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar on Monday described the monsoon situation as "grim", data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) shows that low rainfall had been pretty much on the cards this year, judging from the monsoon's behaviour in the past decade. Rainfall in the decade between 1999 and 2009 was the lowest in the last eight decades. Summer monsoon months between June 2000 and 21 August 2009 registered only 8,124mm of rainfall, 5.5% short of the decadal normal of 8,900mm.

The 1960s and 1970s, each of which saw three all-India drought years, posted 8,927.5mm and 8,850.9mm of rainfall respectively, only 0.2% and 0.5% away from the normal. The past decade has been different by another yardstick. Typically, scientists say, even drought-riddled decades have at least one compensatory year, in which rainfall is excess.

"Not a single year posted excess rainfall this decade. And that's very unusual...perhaps a first in the last nine decades," said Madhavan Rajeevan, a meteorologist in Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and formerly a top forecaster with IMD. Meteorologists add that monsoon rainfall this century broadly followed a 30-year cycle. The 1900s to 1930 saw severe droughts and rainfall years were usually below normal. The 1930s to the 1960's saw good rainfall and few drought years; the 1960's to the 1990s, again saw more droughts and depressed rainfall.

"Therefore, the 1990s to 2020 should have been characterized by good rainfall. The 90s were promis-. ing—there were no droughts," said Rajeevan. "But this decade has completely overturned that trend. The last time we had excess rainfall was 1994."

Why these 10 years saw exceptionally low rainfall is still a matter of research and debate, unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Some scientists blame a resurgent EI Nino, a weather anomaly characterized by a 0.5-1°C temperature increase on specific regions of the Pacific Ocean that, in a domino-effect of sorts, blows away rain-bearing monsoon clouds. "If you just look at the numbers, slightly less than half of All-India drought years correspond to EI Nino years. In the 1980s and 1990's people thought EI Ninos no longer had a bearing on India monsoon, because there were strong EI Nino years and normal rainfalls.

But EI Nino did not recur this year. 2002 and 2004 changed all that," said D.S. Pai, one of the key officials involved with preparing the country's monsoon forecasts. The year 2002 was India's last drought year, with monsoon rainfall at only 81% of the normal and 29% of the country affected. As per IMD's official definition, 2004, in spite of seeing rainfall deficient by 13%) of the normal, wasn't a drought year. That's because only 18.5% of the country's area had deficient rainfall, a whisker short of the qualifying 20%. Its failure to predict deficient rainfall forced the weather agency to abandon its workhorse forecasting models and adopt new weather models.

Other scientists say clues to the depressed rainfall this decade may lie closer home, in the Indian Ocean. "Temperatures in the Indian Ocean have increased nearly 0.4°C over the last 30 years. Therefore, they may be drawing out moisture from the monsoon trough a hulk of rain-bearing clouds that hover over the country between June and September," said K. Krishnakumar, senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), who studies the effect of changes in global climate on the monsoon.

Other veteran meteorologists, such as D.R. Sikka, a former director of IITM, theorize that the haze of black carbon particles and other aerosols has the effect of absorbing moisture from clouds that contribute to the monsoon. But all of the meteorologists concede that their theories are still, at best, just that-—theories. There are several basic things not understood. For instance, the monsoon has a strange, unexplained way of compensating for itself.

One bad monsoon month is usually followed by one month of excess rainfall. That hasn't happened this year. There is a common thread to all these events, though none of the dynamical models an approach where scientists use computer programmes to simulate the atmosphere and forecast the weather seemed to have predicted these patterns of weather. An uncertain monsoon story Met department usually gives as optimistic an outlook of the weather even as ominous signs stare in its face. In 2009, it said rainfall would be normal and only admitted of a drought when it had firmly set in. Given India's widely variant rainfall, a 3% reduction—while certainly not apocalyptic—is still cause for discomfiture.

IMD continues to rely on statistical models, which rely on a historical database of weather phenomena over India, to make predictions. It says that global dynamical models, which simulate existing meteorological conditions and crunch the data in supercomputers, in short the state of the art, aren't good enough to be applied for forecasting the Indian monsoon. Fair enough, but why then hasn't it yet operationalized a programme, called Monsoon Mission for the country as so much of the nation depends upon the Monsoon.

IMD's prescience may well turn out to be right, but it would be more out of fortuity than conviction. The department can't be entirely blamed for the lack of good dynamical models as the equipment it needs, including automatic weather stations, Doppler weather radars and meteorological balloons are in short supply, and stuck in the complicated, constricting arteries of bureaucracy.

Unless these newer models are employed, IMD's statistical tinkering will not matter to India's sowing fields—60% of which are un-irrigated—and where farmers continue to rely more on experience and prayer. Weak models and weakerpredictions are not about fewer rain drops alone. In India, this has a chain of economic consequences. Agriculture being the weakest link in the overall-demand equation, lower rainfall means the government has to take remedial measures to pump prime the economy on a war footing or else 1% point of growth has to be shaved off.

If this is known in advance, the right steps can be taken at the right time. It is 100% true that Climate change, Global temperature pattern. Vegetation cover and Warm ocean phenomenon has maximum influence on exceptional bad monsoon. The same effect has many things to do with what we are facing in Manipur this year. When we had good forest cover with healthy growing stock, we had much less such ecological challenges. But from the day we started clearing our forests, the disguise of the mother earth, trauma of the scary faces of the Environment hatches out. Therefore we must save the forest and plant more trees whose transpiration joins the Earth with Sky to maintain the cycle of natural hydrology. For a healthy Manipur, let us save our forests and plant more trees to avoid such years of scanty monsoon in future.