70% of population depend on agriculture for livelihood
P. Jayaram, Straits Times 27 Jun 09;
NEW DELHI: Villagers are holding frog weddings, women are yoking themselves to ploughs and tilling the fields, and priests are chanting prayers while sitting in cooking pots, as the Indian government worries over truant monsoon rains.
Since it hit the southern coastal state of Kerala a week in advance last month, the south- west monsoon has weakened, prompting people across the country to resort to traditional methods of invoking the rain gods.
And elsewhere, the acute heatwave has claimed at least 100 lives.
In the eastern state of Orissa, at least 58 people have died due to sunstroke since April, disaster management official Durgesh Nandini Sahoo told AFP.
Local newspapers have reported at least 12 deaths in the impoverished northern state of Bihar, and 17 deaths in neighbouring Jharkhand state. And there are other deaths due to the heatwaves in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
The government announced on Wednesday that the monsoon, the mainstay of the country's trillion-dollar economy, will be below normal for the first time in four years.
'Rainfall is likely to be below normal,' Earth Sciences Minister Prithviraj Chavan told a news conference, adding that it would be 93 per cent of the long-term average.
Meteorologists say there is a 45 per cent shortfall in the rain so far, but signs are that it would pick up in the coming days.
The vagaries of the monsoon, which normally comes upon Kerala around June 1 and then rapidly advances northwards and drenches the whole subcontinent, are big news in India.
This is understandable because 70 per cent of the country's one billion-plus population depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and more than 60 per cent of farming is rain-fed.
While parched fields and dry rivers and irrigation ponds present a gloomy picture, the weatherman said there was no cause for panic yet.
'For many years, June rainfall has been bad, but the monsoon turned out normal,' said Mr A. Mazumdar, deputy director-general of the Meteorological Department.
He said that in 1926, for instance, the country experienced its worst June rainfall, deficient by 48 per cent, but the overall monsoon rainfall that year was still above normal, at 107 per cent.
Monsoon rains are key to the cultivation of kharif - or summer - crops like rice, soya bean, sugar cane and cotton, which account for nearly 60 per cent of the country's farm output. A good kharif season augurs well for the economy.
Mr Rajesh Agarwal, chairman and managing director of Insecticides India, a leading manufacturer and distributor of plant protection chemicals and household pesticides, said that while there was a delay in the onset of the monsoon, it was still not very late.
'But definitely people look at rain because once the rain starts, the farmers would be in a better position to look at their crop prospects,' he added.
The impending El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean is also increasing the risk of disruption in the progress of monsoons, experts have said.
El Nino is a periodic climate phenomenon where the Pacific Ocean heats up beyond normal and depletes the monsoon showers in South and South-east Asia.
'The trend over the last five months shows that El Nino could develop this year,' said Mr B.P. Yadav, a spokesman for the Meteorological Department.
