42% of India's land area under drought, 500 mn people severely affected

42% India's Land Area Under Drought, Worsening Farm Distress In Election Year.

Business Standard : About 42% of India’s land area is facing drought, with 6% exceptionally dry--four times the spatial extent of drought last year, according to data for the week ending March 26, 2019, from the Drought Early Warning System (DEWS), a real-time drought monitoring platform.

Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, parts of the North-East, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Telangana are the worst hit. These states are home to 500 million people, almost 40% of the country’s population.

While the central government has not declared drought anywhere so far, the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan have declared many of their districts as drought-hit.

“Before monsoon, which is still far away, the next two or three months are going to be difficult in many of these regions,” Vimal Mishra, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar, and the developer of DEWS, told IndiaSpend.

Failed monsoon rains are the primary reason for the current situation. The North-East monsoon, also known as ‘post-monsoon rainfall’ (October-December) that provides 10-20% of India’s rainfall, was deficient by 44% in 2018 from the long-term normal of 127.2 mm, as per data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD). This compounded the rainfall deficit in the South-West (SW) monsoon (June-September) that provides 80% of India’s rainfall, which fell short by 9.4% in 2018--close to the 10% deficit range when the IMD declares a drought.

India has experienced widespread drought every year since 2015, Mishra said, with the exception of 2017. As the El Nino--the unusual warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that makes Indian summers warmer and reduces rainfall--looms over the 2019 SW monsoon, pre-monsoon showers (March-May) this year have also been deficient. India has received 36% less rainfall than the long-term average between March 1 and March 28, 2019, as per IMD data. The southern peninsular region recorded the lowest, a deficit greater than 60%.

Lower rainfall has reduced water levels in reservoirs across the country. The amount of water available in the country’s 91 major reservoirs has gone down 32 percentage points over five months to March 22, 2019. In 31 reservoirs of southern states, water level has gone down by 36 percentage points over five months.

The drought could further worsen farm distress, exacerbate groundwater extraction, increase migration from rural to urban areas, and further inflame water conflicts between states and between farms, cities and industries.