New Definition of Drought and issues around it

The centre in its recent manual for drought management in 2016 has changed the norms for assessing the severity of drought in a particular region along with the rules being mandatory to follow unlike the earlier manual by the same name in 2009 where they were mere guidelines.

Seeing that guidelines left much space for manipulation, the Supreme Court ordered the centre to come up with compulsory norms.

Drought and Its Implications

A region is considered being drought affected when it witnesses prolonged period of sub optimal levels of rainfall. It leads to shortage of water supply in various sources like moisture content in air, soil moisture, groundwater table and surface water levels. In India, it is usually caused due to delayed or weak monsoon. In a developing country like ours, it translates into many environmental as well as socio-economic problems.

Physically, it depletes the natural sources of water due to reduced soil moisture and surface run offs. It further leads to drying up of reservoirs, lakes and ponds. Also it makes tubewells useless due to reduced water table.

Agriculturally, it hits hard on the farmers. In a country where almost 40% of the population is still dependent on monsoons for irrigation, weaker monsoon means poor crops and reduced yields which further leads to shortage of food grains.

Socio-economically, drought brings reduced wages, poor purchasing power, less profit and even loss of jobs in the agrarian sector. In an agrarian economy like India, shortage of grains turn into sky- rocketing prices of food hitting the poor the worst. In extreme cases, scarcity of food and water or their non-affordability leads to deaths due to starvation mostly among the lower rungs of society.

Therefore, to combat the extremes of drought, states might need the financial assistance of state for which the centre has charted out rules and regulations regarding when it will consider the situation worse enough to provide assistance.

Manual For Drought Management 2016

• The drought has been categorised as ‘normal’ and ‘severe’ with the omission of the ‘moderate’ category under which, in the previous guidelines, centre was liable to provide funds, but now it is also nullified with central govt.’s responsibility being limited to the cases of ‘severe’ droughts. The aid would be provided from National Disaster Relief Fund (NDRF).
• The indicators for declaring a drought affected area have been increased from 4 to 6. Earlier they were rainfall deficiency, extent of area sown, normalised difference vegetation index and moisture adequacy index. These left scope for manipulation. The six indicators now, include Rainfall, Vegetation, Hydrological indices, Crops situation indices, ground verification and others.
• All the indicators barring rainfall and ground verification are termed as impact indicators. Severity in at least four of these impact indicators would lead to the categorisation of a drought as ‘severe’.

Problems Regarding The Norms

Following are the major issues regarding the new norms.

Rainfall Indices

It is the primary indicator which implies that only after proving severity under this parameter can the others be considered drought affected. The condition of severity has been taken as more than 3 weeks of dry spells (50% of the normal rainfall) where earlier it was just 3 weeks which makes it more difficult to prove.

Vegetation Indices (based on remote sensing)

Through satellite, the crop growth is monitored and any negative deviation from normal is considered poor or very poor but only the ‘very poor’ condition is considered detrimental whereas states claim that poor crop can also be an indicator of drought.

Crop Status Indices

The condition set to be considered ‘severe’ is 50% of the agricultural area sown. But this condition is in contradiction to the statistics available about the worst drought witnessed by the state of Karnataka where the area sown was 80% despite the drought. The issue is that northern states possess the luxury of choosing the amount of area to be sown as monsoon reaches late and they are able to analyse if the monsoon are late or weak but the southern states are devoid of this opportunity which makes the norm quite impractical.

Soil Moisture

25% of the soil moisture is to be taken as ‘severe’ but the practical concern is that even 25% to 40% of the soil moisture also gives zero yield.

Hydrological Indices

One of the aspect to judge is groundwater index which is measurable in alluvial plains but not so much in hilly terrains which poses another difficulty to states in Deccan plateau and other regions.

Comment

The problems of inconsistency between states and central arose as centre had devised these rules single handedly without consulting with the affected states. This poses the major difficulty of being able to prove the severity of drought by the states in order to receive financial assistance. It also seems as if centre is trying to escape from its responsibilities.