Droughts

What a Drought Really Is

A drought is not simply a dry spell. It is an extended period when water availability falls short because of three things working together: inadequate precipitation, excessive evaporation, and over-utilisation of water from reservoirs, other storages, and groundwater. The term covers a shortage that persists long enough to hurt people, crops, and ecosystems.

What makes drought a complex phenomenon is that it touches nearly everything. It involves meteorological elements like precipitation, evaporation, evapotranspiration, groundwater, soil moisture, storage and surface run-off. It also involves agricultural practices — especially the types of crops grown — and socio-economic practices and ecological conditions. In other words, drought is as much a human and economic problem as it is a weather problem.

Types of Droughts

The book identifies four distinct types, each defined by what exactly is in short supply.

Meteorological Drought — a prolonged period of inadequate rainfall, marked by mal-distribution of that rainfall over time and space. It is not just that it rains too little; it is that the little rain that falls comes at the wrong times and in the wrong places.

Agricultural Drought — also called soil moisture drought. Here the soil lacks the moisture needed to support crops, which results in crop failures. The book adds an important qualification: if an area has more than 30 per cent of its gross cropped area under irrigation, that area is excluded from the drought-prone category. Irrigation, in other words, can lift an area out of agricultural drought-proneness.

Hydrological Drought — occurs when the water available in storages and reservoirs — aquifers, lakes, reservoirs — falls below what precipitation can replenish. Even if rain returns, the stored water takes time to recover.

Ecological Drought — when the productivity of a natural ecosystem fails due to water shortage, and the resulting ecological distress damages the ecosystem itself. Here the victim is not a crop or a reservoir but the natural environment as a whole.

Various parts of India experience all these droughts recurrently, and they produce serious socio-economic and ecological problems.

Drought-Prone Areas in India

Indian agriculture has always been heavily dependent on monsoon rainfall. Droughts and floods are the two accompanying features of the Indian climate — two sides of the same coin.

Some estimates put the scale starkly: nearly 19 per cent of the total geographical area of the country and 12 per cent of its total population suffer due to drought every year. About 30 per cent of the country's total area is identified as drought-prone, affecting around 50 million people.

A common experience across India is that while some parts reel under floods, other regions face severe drought during the same period. It is equally common for one region to suffer floods in one season and drought in the next. The reason is the large-scale variation and unpredictability in the behaviour of the monsoon. Droughts are thus widespread, but they are most recurrent and severe in some regions and not in others.

On the basis of severity, the book divides India into three drought categories.

Extreme Drought Affected Areas — most of Rajasthan, particularly areas west of the Aravali hills (the Marusthali region), and the Kachchh region of Gujarat. This category also includes desert districts like Jaisalmer and Barmer, which receive less than 90 mm of average annual rainfall.

Severe Drought Prone Areas — parts of eastern Rajasthan, most of Madhya Pradesh, eastern Maharashtra, interior parts of Andhra Pradesh and the Karnataka Plateau, northern parts of interior Tamil Nadu, southern parts of Jharkhand, and interior Odisha.

Moderate Drought Affected Areas — northern Rajasthan, Haryana, southern districts of Uttar Pradesh, the remaining parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra except Konkan, Jharkhand, the Coimbatore plateau of Tamil Nadu, and interior Karnataka.

The remaining parts of India can be considered either free of drought or less prone to it.

Consequences of Drought

Drought has cascading effects — one failure triggers another. Crop failure leads to scarcity of food grains, called akal; scarcity of fodder is trinkal; inadequate rainfall causes shortage of water, jalkal. When all three shortages occur together, it is called trikal — and this is the most devastating situation of all.

The visible sights in drought-affected areas are grim: large-scale death of cattle and other animals, and migration of humans and livestock. Scarcity of water compels people to consume contaminated water, which spreads waterborne diseases like gastro-enteritis, cholera, and hepatitis.

Droughts have both immediate and long-term disastrous consequences on the social and physical environments. Planning for drought must therefore take both time horizons into account.

Immediate measures include: …