With India’s four-month monsoon season now officially over, the nation’s meteorological department has announced that the country is experiencing the worst drought in 37 years, with rains 23 percent
below normal. Especially hard-hit have been the region’s major rice- and cereal-growing regions in the northern and western states of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan, where rains this year were 36 percent below normal. That region is also rapidly depleting its underground water supplies, as farmers with inexpensive diesel pumps extract irrigation water at an unsustainable rate, a trend that scientists warn could threaten Indian agriculture in the coming decades. The Indian government says the country has 52 million tons of wheat and rice in reserve, enough to last a year. But the drought and feeble monsoon rains have caused economic hardship for many of the 600 million Indians who still depend on agriculture for their livelihood.
UNEP