Monsoon Matters Too Much Now

?M? Dinesh Kumar, Saikat Mandal and Ambili K

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The reading of the title of a recent Editorial in the Times of India ‘Monsoon Still Matters’ (April, 17, 2024), while surprising us also created a shock. The surprise was because a newspaper found the issue of monsoon and its link with India’s agricultural growth and food security, a matter which has always been in the domain of agricultural economists and macroeconomic policy makers, so relevant as to write an editorial. The shock was because of the phrase ‘Still’ used in the title. It basically implied that in the current scenario, monsoon should not have mattered much.

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The first paragraph read like this: “IMD’s first south west monsoon forecast on Monday (read it as April 15) said that in 2024 we are in for an above normal rainfall. It’s expected to be 106% of the long term average of 87cm. It’s positive for the kharif crop season, which was affected last year by a below normal monsoon that was also erratic in terms of monthly rainfall”.

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For a layman, the contents of this paragraph are benign. It has always been understood that a good monsoon means a good kharif crop in India. However, for a person who understand India’s hydrology and agriculture and the link between the two, this is not the entire truth. India’s agricultural output is just about the kharif crop. It is also about the Rabi crop and to some extent the summer crop. So it is equally important to know the implications of monsoon for cropping in those two seasons.

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The next paragraph in the Editorial, however, reveals the half-baked knowledge of the media about the criticality of monsoon in India’s agricultural outputs and the danger that it poses. It argued that the link between the (agricultural) output and monsoon had weakened over the years. It read: “India’s agricultural output is no longer as closely tied to annual rainfall, thanks to the widespread irrigation”. To substantiate this point, the article goes on to say that in spite of drops in paddy outputs during the drought years of 2002 and 2009, the agricultural output has been growing.

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The Editorial went on to say: “Leave aside the two shocks, output has generally trended upwards even though below normal monsoon years have sometimes led to a modest decline in production”. The statement tends to play down the role of monsoon in determining India’s agricultural outputs.

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While it is true that there has been a long-term growth in agricultural outputs (in value terms), there are lots of fluctuations between years, with the outputs falling far below the trend line and negative growth witnessed in several years. This is precisely because of the sharp reduction in rainfall that resulted in major decline in irrigation potential of surface water bodies and aquifers. Particularly in this case, what is important is what happened to the aggregate output in 2002 and 2009. That was not mentioned in the article.

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Therefore, statements like the one above are misleading as they send out the message that once we build enough irrigation infrastructure, we don’t need the support of monsoon rains to sustain agricultural growth. This is mechanistic thinking which delinks irrigation from rainfall and look at the former as an independent variable. Unfortunately, some economist have further reinforced the myth that increase in irrigated area will eventually lead to agricultural outputs becoming less sensitive to rainfall. Anything which contradicts this will surprise them. For instance, a recent work by Kathuria and Rajagopalan (2023), which analyzed the impact of monsoon rainfall variability on regional agricultural outputs, says: “Despite the increase in irrigated areas in the last few decades, the impact of monsoon failure is now felt more strongly than ever. The situation may be true for other rain-dependent countries. This is because of the following three reasons: (i) public sensitivity to the adverse impact caused by monsoon failure has increased as it is widely acknowledged that India is now better equipped to tackle such events; (ii) the impact of water shortage is felt more intensely due to burgeoning demand from agriculture and other sources; and (iii) increased dependence on water due to commercialisation and water-intensive cultivation”.

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While it is true that it is irrigation expansion (to be precise, expansion in actual irrigated area) that help us increase agricultural outputs on a long-term basis to a great extent, we should not lose sight of the fact that for us to make full use of that infrastructure, good precipitation is a pre-requisite. Higher the capacity of irrigation infrastructure, higher the criticality of precipitation to realize full irrigation potential. The importance of monsoon as a driver of agricultural production can be established if we look at the annual agricultural growth rates against the difference in annual rainfall (between the year and the preceding year). So this basically means, with fluctuations in annual rainfall, the agricultural growth rates will fluctuate and can also become negative if the rainfall is much less than that of the previous year, even with very high levels of irrigation in absolute terms.

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This is precisely the reason why we see big decline in agricultural outputs with sharp decline in monsoon rainfall (as compared to the previous year) and a big jump in output with significant increase in monsoon rainfall (as compared to the previous year), even in regions with large irrigation potential already created.?

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In fact, as our research had shown, the (annual) agricultural output growth is driven by difference in rainfall between the year concerned and the preceding year and not by the departure of the rainfall from the normal value, unlike what many economists had argued for many years. This means, even if the rainfall in a particular year is below normal (say, 95% of the normal), if it is more than that of the previous year (which witnessed 90% of the normal rains), we are likely to get a high positive growth in agricultural outputs. The growth rate will be higher if we are able to achieve some expansion in irrigated area also between the two years. Vice versa is also true (Kumar et al., 2019).??

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The Times of India Editorial tries to give full credit to the surge in groundwater irrigation for the resilience of agricultural outputs. While doing so, it does not even make a mention of the hundreds of large reservoirs and canal networks that not only help irrigate vast areas of crop land in our country, but also replenishes the groundwater thereby sustaining well irrigation in those areas. It looks like the myopic thinking among large number of Indian researchers has also influenced the media. However, towards the end, the article takes a twist in argument saying that without good monsoon, recharge will not happen and therefore well irrigation will not be sustainable. That part is somewhat consoling!

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The fact is that without good rainfall, neither would there be good well irrigation, nor would there be good surface irrigation through canals. Merely having irrigation infrastructure (like wells and canals) do not help, but there should be enough water that rejuvenate them in the form of recharge of the aquifers and inflows into the reservoirs. More importantly, with greater degree of development of irrigation infrastructure (whether wells or reservoirs + canals or tanks) within a river basin or a catchment, agricultural outputs become more and more sensitive to rainfall deficits.

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This is because, at high degree of development of water in a basin or a catchment, higher would be the probability of the reservoirs not getting adequate quantities of water for achieving full storage for a given deficit rainfall. Such a storage deficit will lead to reduction in area under cropping in areas that are otherwise getting irrigated through water released from such reservoirs, resulting in sharp decline in crop outputs.

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Let us see what it means in practice. The impact of a 10 per cent decline in rainfall (from the normal values) on agricultural outputs in terms of percentage reduction from the previous year will be much higher now in a river basin like Krishna or Cauvery or Pennar or Godavari than that we would have witnessed from a 10 per cent reduction in rainfall some 40-50 years ago when irrigation development was much lower in those basins. Today, even with very high degree of water resources development, agricultural growth in Gujarat is far more sensitive to rainfall fluctuations.

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The use of better crop technologies and introduction of high value crops also contribute to agricultural growth, but for all that to happen, irrigation is a must, and for irrigation precipitation is the key input.

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The Editorial makes another dangerous conclusion, when it says: “Some of the most productive regions in terms of yield have insulated themselves from annual rainfall variations but not their dependence on monsoon. Here again, the writer seems to be referring to Punjab. The case in Punjab is not similar to that of other regions of India. Punjab has a large groundwater stock and therefore how much the farmers can access in a year is not highly susceptible to monsoon variations. Secondly: Punjab gets a large amount of imported surface water for irrigation. So the actual impact of rainfall on Punjab’s agriculture would be known only if we look at the changes in rainfall and snowfall in Sutlej basin and not within Punjab.

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To conclude, we would like to state: “For India’s agricultural output growth today, the rain matters too much”.

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Kathuria, V., Rajagopalan, B. (2023) Monsoon Rainfall Variability in India: Impact on Regional Economies, Economic and Political Weekly, 58 (24): 103-111.?

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Kumar, M. D., Ganguly, A., Sivamohan, MVK (2019) What Drives Annual Agricultural Growth Rates in India, Economic and Political Weekly, 54 (1): 33-36.

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About the authors: The authors, M. Dinesh Kumar, Saikat Mandal and Ambili K, work for the Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad. The views are personal. Email address for correspondence: [email protected]?