Officially, drought is a permanent disaster that strikes, on an average, 50 million Indians every year; 33 per cent of the country is chronically drought-affected while close to 68 per cent areas are drought-prone.
India has more than 150 years of experience in drought management. Despite this, every time the country faces a deficit monsoon, we plunge into a crisis.

Main cause of drought is due to lack of rainfall:-

• The existing problems of rainfed regions, if not addressed in time, will get more acute in the coming years due to global warming and climate change. There would be a downward trend in the number of wet days in a year; in a country which gets rain only for less than 100 hours in a year (a year has 8,760 hours), this would be disastrous.
• Deficient and uneven rainfall in the last two agricultural years adversely affected overall agricultural production

Measures taken:-

• In the last six decades India has spent more than Rs 3.5 lakh crore on water conservation and drought-proofing.
• Particularly, in the last one decade, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has helped create, on an average, 21 water bodies in every village. Some 12.3 million water harvesting structures have been built.
• India has a better monsoon forecasting system than India had before and crisis response management has improved.

However policy mechanisms are to be blamed more:-

Centre-state non cooperation:-

• Earlier, the states could approach the Centre for drought relief without restrictions of the category of drought, and ask for monetary help under the Calamity Relief Fund and the National Calamity Contingency Fund.
• However new “Manual for Drought Management” says that the states can ask for Centre’s help only if the drought is “severe”. Also the parameters that make a drought “severe” are extremely stringent.
• Maharashtra launched Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan to make the state drought-free by 2019 by carrying out decentralised soil and water conservation works. But the situation on the ground remains worrisome.
• Other contributing factors such as rapid population growth, depletion of groundwater resources, poor water management, chronic lack of investment in storage systems, greater urbanization, consequent large-scale deforestation and leveling of water bodies like large ponds and lakes for legal or illegal constructions have added to the water problems.

Water intensive crops:-

• Government policies such as subsidies for particularly water-intensive crops as well as heavy irrigation methods for having contributed to the problem.
• There is a political reluctance to control water-hungry crops in low-rainfall regions, such as sugarcane in Maharashtra and paddy in Punjab.
• Successive Indian governments have for many decades failed to invest in rural infrastructure, particularly water storage and irrigation infrastructure, which has been a major contributor to the drought problems of India
• The policy approach to agriculture since the 90s has been to secure increased production by subsidising inputs such as power, water and fertiliser; and by increasing the minimum support price, rather than by building new capital assets in surface irrigation, rainwater harvesting, improving credit for smallholders and evolving new drought-resistant technologies.
• This has shifted the production base from low-cost regions to high-cost ones, causing an increase in the cost of production, regional imbalance and an increase in the burden of storage and transport of produce.

Exploitation of groundwater:-

• Policies have resulted in excessive use of capital on farms, such as too many tubewells in water-scarce regions.
• Groundwater, as opposed to surface and sub-soil water, has become the main source of irrigation, leading to more than 30% of the blocks in the country getting classified as semi-critical, critical or overexploited.
• As there is no effective control over the digging of tubewells in water-scarce regions, farmers are borrowing money from informal sources at high interest rates to dig tubewells, but many such borings fail, leading to indebtedness and even suicides.

Lack of participation:-

• The government of India has announced several programmes in soil and water conservation but, when undertaken by the agriculture department, these remain departmental in approach with no involvement of people. Maintenance of the created assets suffers, as beneficiaries are not motivated to assume responsibility for maintenance.
• Watershed development programmes cannot succeed without full participation of project beneficiaries and careful attention to issues of social organisation. Despite the fact that MGNREGA mandates that 80% of work must be related to local water conservation and drought-proofing, the sustainability and productivity of assets created is never monitored.

Impact:-

• Impact of drought is felt directly by farmers, due to poor crop yields or crop failures, which results in reduced farm incomes, and this has wider transmission effects throughout rural communities due to lower consumer spending by agricultural households.
• Many farmers in India are also deeply indebted and need good harvests to allow them to recoup financial losses and repay loans.
• Drought is a major factor in the thousands of farmer suicides afflicting India over the last few decades.

Way forward:-

• A large-scale national water infrastructure development program that will not only use Indian public funds but also leverage international aid assistance and other forms of development finance to rapidly build up national water storage capacity is needed.
• India need to build a much larger network of big water reservoirs as well as regional and local water storage systems.
• In parallel, advanced agricultural irrigation systems should be integrated into low rainfall areas of India, utilizing advanced technology that is used in arid areas of countries such as the US, Australia and Israel
• Modernization of urban waterworks is also very important in order to prevent large-scale loss of water through leaking and damaged pipes.
  In the short term, however, the Indian government can take certain preemptive and proactive steps to lessen the vulnerability of people to drought.
• This should entail providing more financial support to farmers; staging awareness raising campaigns that teach people how to conserve water and use it more judiciously; and essentially giving people incentives to use water cautiously.
• Need to reduce unrestricted mining of groundwater and ensure stricter implementation of environmentally sound cropping patterns.
• Drip irrigation and a water sprinkler approach, mulching and bed plantation, and construction of tanks and check dams should be promoted for water harvesting and conservation.
• Build efficient irrigation systems and water conservation strategies in rainfed regions, through conjunctive use of surface and groundwater. Agriculture in semi-arid regions has to move from traditional, crop-centric farming to agri-pastoral-farm-forestry systems (fruit trees, shrubs, perennial grasses and small ruminants).
• MS Swaminathan , as a long-term solution to drought and financial support to farmers, advocated the implementation of the Minimum Support Price. He recommended pricing and procurement based on total cost of production plus 50 percent principal.