Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Uncertainty Of Monsoon Continues To Haunt India

Call it the whims of the monsoon. Meteorological scientists will show that there is some method behind the whims. This year the rains began on May 24 over Kerala, easily a week earlier than the usual date.

Naturally, it caused a flutter all around. There was a sigh of relief that the gruelling summer had ended. In many places, with a few exceptions of above normal temperatures, it has been a bearable summer, even a short one in many ways. The economic analysts in the Reserve Bank of India, in the think tanks, and within and outside the government were happy too because it assured that the above normal — not necessarily connected with the early onset — monsoon would mean good agricultural growth, including higher foodgrains output.

Government figures (National Accounts Statistics) show that the Gross Value Added (GVA) growth of the economy was 6.5 per cent between 2014-15 and 2019-20, and the share of agriculture, forestry and fishing was 4.7 per cent, compared to industry’s 5.6 per cent and the services sector’s 7.4 per cent. And in the 2014-15 to 2023-24 period (R. Ramkumar of the School of Developmental Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai took the two periods of comparison keeping in the Covid-19 pandemic interruption of 2020-21, 2022-23), the GVA growth of the economy was five per cent, and the contribution of agriculture was 4.5 per cent, of industry 4.7 per cent and of the services sector 4.7 per cent.

Agriculture is a key factor in the growth rate of the economy. The Economic Survey 2023-24 noted that agriculture contributes 16 per cent of GDP and supports 46.1 per cent of the population.

From the time when there was a 16-vector monsoon prediction model of the 1990s, Indian meteorology has come a long way. There is abundant record of daily, weekly and monthly rainfall Statistics, neatly stacked in tables. The statistics do reveal regional variations and fluctuations, which make for absorbing reading. In 2014, 54 per cent of the districts received normal or excess rainfall, while 46 per cent of the districts had deficient rainfall. The pattern was repeated in 2015, when 51 per cent of the districts got normal or excess rainfall, while 49 per cent of the districts had deficient rainfall. In the other years, in 2013, and from 2016 to 2024, nearly 70 per cent of the districts had normal or excess rainfall. In 2014-15, the foodgrain production was 252.68 million tonnes, a 4.466 per cent fall from the 265.04 million tonnes in 2013-14. In the years when nearly half the districts in the country had deficient rainfall, the foodgrains output remained at comfortable levels. It did not entail food shortages as it did in the mid-1960s. It is for this reason that drought has disappeared from the public vocabulary. Drought is now localised.

The Economic Survey 2023-24 noted that “the sector remains highly vulnerable to weather variability, with only 55 per cent of the net sown area receiving irrigation. A substantial portion of the agricultural land relies on rain-fed systems, making it especially susceptible to fluctuations in precipitation.” Citing expert opinion, the Survey says that there is a “strong link between significant rainfall shortfalls and substantial crop yield losses”. The net sown area is 139.3 million hectares, while the net irrigated area is 71.6 million hectares. So, nearly 50 per cent of sown area is dependent on the monsoon. The monsoon remains a key factor in the Indian economy, something that cannot be wished away.

India has been trying to shrug off the label of an agricultural economy. After the 1980s, it has emerged as a services-driven economy. For the last 10 years and more, there is a consistent attempt to make India a manufacturing hub. There has been moderate success on the manufacturing front.

Economists and policy-makers have been looking hard at the reasons. Private investment has been the bugbear of why manufacturing was not taking off. The government has been exhorting private sector to invest in industry, and schemes like Productivity Linked Incentive (PLI) had been rolled out to attract private investments. Even as the manufacturing take-off is underway, agriculture remains a dominant aspect of the national economy.

The impact of monsoon goes beyond agriculture. Hydro-power generation is dependent on reservoirs, which in turn depend on the monsoon. While the share of solar and wind power as renewable energy sources is increasing, hydro-power contributes 10.2 per cent of the 45.3 per cent of renewable sources of energy. The monsoon is a vital factor for the ever- expanding urban sector in the country, for controlling intensity, for nurturing green cover and providing for the water systems to sustain the crowded cities and towns. Water scarcity is a nightmare for cities even as drought is to the farmers.

There is also the additional factor of excessive rainfall. A recent research paper in the British science journal Nature, authored by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) scientists, talked of the need to a construct a model to predict excessive rainfall activity (ERA) during the monsoon months because of the damage it does to crops. And cities face excess rainfall threat leading to floods, loss of lives, and destruction of property. Rainfall and cities are one of growing areas of study even as Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru experiences them in recent years and the residents of the cities and the local government were caught on the wrong foot. While they were unprepared on the one hand, the absence of drainage systems because of unthinking building activity was the other major factor.

Monsoon was once an interesting and romantic element of the popular cinema in India though it has disappeared altogether today. And it was part of poetry in all languages. The absence of the monsoon from the cultural consciousness is an interesting fact. Some people would moan and swoon in bouts of nostalgia. But the times have changed and it is the small screen on the mobile phone that dominates rather than the clouds in the sky portending rain. But the monsoon remains a hard fact of life, for the farmers, and for city-slickers, too, because water remains part of the toolkit of life. You are forced to look up for the issues concerning the monsoon even if you do not moon about it.