ALTERNATIVES
From Down to Earth: India’s vicious cycle of crippling drought and then devastating floods, which happens every year, is getting a new normal. First, floods and droughts come together. Secondly, rainfall is not only variable but also extreme. There’s only one answer: obsessive attention to building millions and millions of connected and living water structures….
Read More about Sunita Narain: Old answers for ‘new’ monsoon
CLIMATE CRISIS
From The Third Pole: For the third year in a row, India’s monsoon season has produced floods in the northwest/northeast, while south India has a rainfall deficit. The key question right now is whether we’re headed towards increased monsoon extremes, or whether global warming is causing shifts in the duration, intensity and frequency of rainfall….
Read More about What’s causing so many changes to India’s monsoons?Development/Growth
Irfan Syed writes: After it finished reclaiming land from water and then claiming the air (high-rises), the city of Mumbai, being a financial, marketing, and glamour capital and therefore having ceaseless immigration, has been devouring land, like a super-starved T-Rex. After eating up most of legit land, it’s been turning its attention to… the forest….
Read More about It’s raining big cats on dogged, destructive developmentCLIMATE CRISIS
Sunitha Natti reports: A New Indian Express analysis shows we are witnessing four back-to-back droughts for the first time in at least 100 years and are coursing through another as we speak. At least two of them were severe. Analysis of rainfall data across states for the past three decades threw up some startling findings….
Read More about Express Study: Fourth Successive ‘Drought’ in 100 Years
CLIMATE CRISIS
SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….
Read More about CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
CLIMATE CRISIS
Rajabhau Deshmukh, a farmer from Beed says: We’ve been reaping merely 20-30% of our average crop in the last few years. Even as bank loans, moneylenders’ debts, relatives’ credits and the interest keep gnawing at us, we’ve to somehow run our homes. To be honest, it seems we are not even allowed to fall sick….
Read More about A Marathwada farmer’s wake-up call to India: try to understand why we die
George Varghese
CLIMATE CRISIS
The rains have let us down terribly this year. There were farmers in our area who did not bother planting their rice crop when they realized that it wasn’t going to rain much this year and then there were others that took a chance and planted but didn’t bother harvesting since the crop was a disaster….
Read More about Weathering The Change - A Farmer’s Diary of 2015
Morvarid Fernandez
CLIMATE CRISIS
Morvarid Fernandez writes: Our crops failed, cattle graze the dry paddy straw, and fields remain fallow because there is not enough water. Bore wells are deeper, the lines longer, and the black blister bug – usually a bane – simply did not appear last year. The monsoon of 2015, you ask. But there just wasn’t one….
Read More about Winds of change – A view from Nersa
