Some global weather watchers have warned that India will likely see below-normal rainfall during this coming monsoon -- and that should be taken seriously, regardless of whether it turns out to be true or not.
This scenario has been repeatedly predicted by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and has been endorsed by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.
The prognosis has been lent further weight by a hint from the United Kingdom's meteorological office, in its long-range global weather forecast, that the chance of India getting above-normal rainfall during the entire four-month period of July-September is only 40 per cent.
The Indian meteorological establishment typically rubbishes these long-range forecasts. Many in that establishment vocally maintain that it is too early to visualise the performance of a complex weather system like the Indian monsoon.
However, these global agencies have a proven positive track record, and it would be unwise to brush their projections aside totally. After all, India's meteorologists err too much on the side of safety to produce usable data.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) announces its preliminary long-range monsoon forecast only around the middle of April. By that time the monsoon has already hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and is just a few days away from its onset on the Kerala coastline.
An alert sounded at that point is of little value to agricultural planning. Farmers and agri-businesses need to plan early for abnormalities in the monsoon. Cropping patterns must be modified; seeds and other inputs need to be arranged.
That can't be done in mid-April. Furthermore, the IMD's first forecast indicates only the likely total amount of rainfall in India as a whole and over the entire monsoon season.
That is unhelpful; it is the rainfall's distribution over time and space that matters for agriculture, reservoir management and preparations for droughts or floods.
The forecasts issued by these global agencies, on the other hand, have signalled even the monsoon's likely pattern: good rains in summer and the early part of the season, with a relatively drier phase in August and September -- one that would affect, in particular, the north-west and parts of central India.
The IMD doesn't venture such detail till the monsoon is half over, by which time any value is strictly academic. Even then, they aren't always accurate.
Indeed, among the three possible monsoon aberrations -- belated onset, early withdrawal and a prolonged break in between -- the third, which is what is being foreseen for this year, is the most difficult to manage.
For, by then, the sowing season is already over and the only option left is to arrange for some life-saving irrigation for the water-stressed crops. That, obviously, requires advance planning.
It is too early to be scared or to declare this monsoon below-par; but it is not too early to prepare. The government must move to ensure that the systems needed to support emergency irrigation in August and September are in place. It cannot just sit around waiting for dilatory IMD forecasts before it takes any precautionary action.
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