Water in God's Hands

A few days ago we told you about India’s battle with the rain gods. As the battle continues India’s farmers are increasingly facing the certainty that in the next few weeks they will have to hear the dreaded words that the water bearing monsoons have indeed failed. This bit of information as far as the officials in the Indian government including the Agriculture Minister is still “too premature”. We have to assume that the monsoons despite having revived a bit in the last three days are going to be sub par. The worst case scenario will be that the country is heading towards a drought.

The panic at the ground level has already set in. The hope that the monsoon will indeed revive like there was a few weeks ago is slowly fading away. Like I said earlier the Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has been saying that the monsoon will revive and the country will have a normal farming season.

There is nothing normal about the rains being delayed by over three weeks and not hitting the earth which has served as India’s food belt for centuries –the northern plains of Punjab and Haryana.

A delayed season has definitely thrown the sowing season out of gear. By this time the crops must have been planted and farmers would have been looking onward to tending them thus harvesting them in time for planting the second round of crops.

No matter how powerful Sharad Pawar is he still has absolutely no control over the forces of nature therefore statements like ‘the monsoon is likely to revive’ or ‘crops will be normal’ is either wishful thinking or just plain old fashioned stupidity.

India’s import bill is guaranteed to go up this year and after staring at a fiscal deficit of 6.8%, one wonders how the Finance Minister is going to bring that number down to below five by next year like he promised in Parliament.

Even a medium crop at this stage in the rain scanty areas is an acceptable target. By some intelligent water harvesting the farmer can achieve a decent crop. The problem lies in the fact that even if he has the water he does not have enough electricity.

Irrigation is dependent on electricity and electricity in most of India is water powered. So when the dams run dry, the turbines gather dust and electricity is low.

Most cities are already facing multiple power cuts at different times and of different lengths.

India is figuratively one step away from declaring a drought and a failed monsoon. All hope once again rests on the monsoon which even if delayed is much better than denied.

The impact will be felt later, for the moment the country has a decent stock of food grains but considering that such stores become infected by parasites, another problem has emerged.

Farmers have some time to deal with this situation. The silver lining for them is that the government has extended its loan waiver scheme till the end of the year so secondary crops can still salvage them.