IPCC Report | Time to smell the rain; the warning lights are flashing furiously

Rains in Mumbai (File Image: News18)

The June-September rains provide relief from a sticky summer in India. Schools shut down. Families go on vacation. But the monsoon is more than just a cool respite from a blazing summer: it’s the life-blood of India’s economy.

So, it will be nothing short of foolhardy to ignore the warning signals that the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has flagged about the likely increase of monsoon extremes over India and South Asia.

Heat waves and humid heat stress will be more intense and frequent in the 21st century. Changes in monsoon precipitation are also expected, with both annual and summer monsoon precipitation projected to increase.

‘Heat extremes have increased while cold extremes have decreased, and these trends will continue over the coming decades,’ it says for the Indian subcontinent.

There’s more to monsoon than inspired purple prose and the romance of pitter-patter. The south-west monsoon is essentially a reversal of wind patterns: cool oceanic breeze that blows over the hot Indian landmass, resulting in rainfall.

It’s a long expedition nature undertakes each year. Drafts of early-summer breeze in the southern Pacific stream blow northwards, preparing to travel more than 8,000 km to reach Asia in time, and picking moisture on the way.

If the Pacific winds are one essential ingredient of a perfect monsoon, the Indian summer is another. In due course, the winds sweep the Indian landscape, with heat conditions just the right for ‘precipitation’ or rainfall to happen.

It starts over Kerala, its first port of call in the Indian mainland, in the first week of June. It then cuts off into two branches — one over the Bay of Bengal and the over the Arabian Sea, before typically covering the whole country within a month.

Until recently, the monsoon was thought to be a distinctly Asian phenomenon. Monsoons do occur in other parts of the world too, such as in Europe, Africa and Chile. Until the 1990s, there was a debate if the June-September rainy season in the US was indeed a monsoon. Meteorologists ultimately classified it as the North American monsoon.

Two-thirds of Indians depend on farm income and about 40 percent of our cropped area still does not have any form of irrigation other than the rains. Millions of farmers wait for the rains to begin summer sowing of major staples, such as rice, sugar, cotton, coarse cereals.

Half of India's farm output comes from summer kharif crops dependent on the monsoon. Millions of farmers wait for the rains to begin summer sowing of major staples such as rice, sugar, cotton, coarse cereals. For good farm output, the rains have to be not just robust but also evenly spread across states.

Delayed rains can hit planting of key crops. Paddy saplings, for instance, first need to be grown in small nurseries for 21 days before being transplanted or laid out on watery fields. Without timely rains, they will over-age.

The monsoon also replenishes 81 nationally-monitored water reservoirs vital for drinking, power and irrigation.

When rain-dependent farm output is robust, rural income and, therefore, spending on almost everything — television sets to gold — goes up. This creates demand for manufactured goods, which in turn helps the general economy. For example, 48 percent of all motorcycles and 44 percent of TV sets are sold in rural India. Without this demand, industrial growth would slow down.

Normal rains also act as a strong check on inflation through plentiful food stocks. Food inflation, if unchecked, can also knock up non-food, non-fuel inflation or what economists describe as ‘core’ inflation, such as prices of manufactured goods. For instance, the drought in 2009 in India resulted in one of the highest generalised inflation levels seen in almost a decade.

The IPCC report projected a lengthening of the monsoon over India by the end of the 21st century. Importantly, it also showed new evidence about the effect of local land use and land cover change on heavy precipitation. Urbanisation intensifies extreme precipitation, especially in the afternoon and early evening, over the urban area and its downwind region, the report said.

There is ample evidence in world history to show that under-prepared urbanisation can hurt economies badly. The IPCC report reinforces this through the climatic prism.

Currently, 30 percent of India’s population lives in cities and towns. This will go up to 60 percent in the next 10-15 years. History has shown that in every country it takes years for the proportion of urban population to reach 30 percent of the total, but the jump from 30 percent to 60 percent is very, very rapid.

India’s policymakers and citizens should take these warning signs with utmost seriousness. These early warnings should be treated as a powerful blessing, enabling authorities and other stakeholders to plan decades ahead. Planning for a rainy day, or a no rain day, is more than a cliché. The latest climate transformation projections reinforce the maxim’s wisdom.