There are lots of ongoing discussions and calculations on ‚How India should deviate its growing emissions from Key Polluting Sectors?‘ and the aspect international community as well as Indian Government failed to acknowledge is that poor citizens of India are suffering – We have drought this year in Rural areas severly impacting the agriculture sowing season and at the Urban scale, our cities faced flood situation due to torrential rains.
But we do miss a strategy that needs to be implemented in a very coordinated manner. This year the state government in early days of monsoon period started panicking due to delayed rains on which most of the marginal and small farmers depend for their rainfed agriculture practices. Most of the State governments did announced drought and started thinking on releif packages with Central (Feadral) Government. Now this reminds of an excellent book ‚Every one loves drought‘. However later the drought affected areas in India did received intense rains in less time creating a situation of floods. Since the nature of disaster did play an important role in releif responses, the policy makers were seen to be confused. While a farmer has been impacted with extreme disasters, how to deal with situation where the farmers livelihoods are gone and due to age old definnation of disaster in a country releif package cannot be considered.
Such Policy decisions are made on basis of inputs from Indian Meterology Department Scientists and for them based on the formula of totl ranfall in a year, the monsoon period looks like NORMAL. While for a farmer, they could not get enough rain during sowing period and their standing crops washed away due to delayed intense rains.
Country facing impending drought: PM
REUTERS 18 August 2009, 11:19am IST
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday that the country was facing a drought threat.
India’s vital monsoon rains have been 29 percent below normal since the beginning of the June-September season, hurting crops such as rice and sugarcane and triggering a sharp rise in food prices. „We are staring at the prospect of an impending drought,“ Singh told a meeting of environment ministers from different states.
Monsoon rains have revived in the past few days, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, where the local government has declared a drought in the majority of the districts. The weather office has forecast widespread rains in the key cane-growing areas in north and northwest India as well as Madhya Pradesh, the main soybean-growing region.
Agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said on Monday that the country needed to raise planting of winter-sown crops and improve irrigation to make up for the damage to farms.
Monsoon rains are vital for India’s summer-sown crops such as rice, sugarcane and soybeans because the majority of the farmers do not have access to irrigation facilities.