India, the Asian giant is in the grip of drought, but the government decreases compensation for farmers

MILAN (AsiaNews) – The scarce rains and the delay of the monsoons in India have delayed the planting of kharif crops, i.e. those that are grown during the monsoons, between June and August, such as rice, corn and soybeans. In at least 14 important Indian states where agriculture is the cornerstone of the local economy, it hasn’t rained for months and thus farmers can only live in a waiting situation, considering whether to switch to short-term crops to avoid reseeding , after the loss of a crop.

The direct consequences of climate change. India’s vulnerability to drought is equal to that of sub-Saharan Africa, but everything in the sub-continent could get worse due to the decisions of the Indian government. Four Indian states, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar, experienced very little rainfall last year, with rainfall more than 70 percent below normal in some districts.

Groundwater is also exhausted. After India was hit by famine in 1966, agriculture – a sector in which 45% of the population is employed – began to develop groundwater abstraction systems, but the basins dried up, adding to the drought meteorological and hydrological.

Periods of drought lengthen. Another problem that some authors have highlighted is that in the future droughts, instead of lasting one season, could last several years in a row, an event that has so far only happened once, between 1985 and 1987. Current policies mitigation measures do not yet foresee the possibility of multi-year droughts.

Compensation stop. The 2022 monsoon season was the driest ever and entire Kharif crops were badly damaged. But if farmers had previously received compensation from the central government, this did not happen last year, because declaring a state of natural disaster is a necessary requirement to obtain aid from Delhi.

Bureaucracy makes it difficult to declare an emergency. But it was not a mistake by local governments: in 2016 the Ministry of Agriculture revised the National Manual for drought management, adopting more stringent criteria and making it more bureaucratically difficult to declare an emergency. What’s more, whereas previously individual states could apply to the National Disaster Relief Fund in the event of moderate and severe drought, since 2016 it has only been possible to do so for the most extreme climatic events.

The Discovery of the Daily Scroll. The online newspaper Scroll found that Uttar Pradesh – ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the same party from which Prime Minister Narendra Modi in power since 2014 – has narrowly avoided declaring a state of drought in several districts, despite official and farmer reports would make him eligible to apply for relief funds. In Jharkhand, on the other hand, the vulnerable conditions had been documented and reported to the central government by October, but the reparations still did not arrive.

The new criteria for proving the existence of drought. Before 2016, a State could declare a state of drought based on various criteria, including, in addition to the level of rainfall, soil moisture and the area sown. Now, however, a two-stage transition is needed: first, a drought can be declared when rainfall is below the normal level, then state and district officials must make an assessment by collecting four data points on four parameters: area planted , crop conditions, soil moisture level and water level.

The necessary parameters. The condition of severe drought, the only one for which reimbursements are currently envisaged, is recognized only if three or four parameters are below a certain threshold, while for moderate drought two are sufficient. But some states don’t even have the ability to measure them. In Jharkhand, for example, a local official explained: “We don’t use the soil moisture index in the drought declaration, because we don’t monitor it.”

The specter of widespread under-nutrition. Of those who managed to submit their refund request last year and have it confirmed (about 300 thousand people), half are still waiting for the check, almost a year later the banks are still processing the applications. These administrative shortcomings take on even more seriousness given last year’s report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to which the increase in drought in the coming years “will have a negative impact on the availability and prices of food, with consequent increase in under-nutrition in South Asia and Southeast Asia”.