Adapt to change

Adapt to change

Drought in Chennai and flooding in Assam are two different faces of the same problem.

Not for the first time has Chennai’s perennial water crisis resulted in trains being used to ferry water to the parched city. But this time the problem has assumed frightening proportions. Chennai’s problems should be juxtaposed with the progress of the southwest monsoon, to foreground a larger challenge India faces. The nature and scale of this challenge are often ignored when the monsoon picks up pace in July but that shouldn’t be the case. It’s time to acknowledge that India’s climatic pattern is changing. Collective effort should be directed towards adapting to this change.

The change has been showing up in interconnected areas. First, research shows that there is an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme rainfall in India in the general backdrop of a dry epoch. Second, the past five years have been the warmest in modern record. Third, a consequence of these shifts is that sea levels are rising. Government recently informed Parliament that the sea level has been rising at the annual rate of 5.16 mm in Diamond Harbour, Bengal, a level noticeably higher than the global average.

It can no longer be business as usual. Chennai crisis is the outcome of being blind to impending changes. Similarly, repeated flooding in Assam shows that authorities there are also unprepared. Given the bouts of extreme rainfall and growing urban sprawls, water storage facilities assume greater importance. This means local accountability has to be enhanced through greater devolution of powers to urban centres. At the same time state governments need to be proactive in solving coordination problems between urban areas and surrounding rural areas where water is to be stored. Simply put, governance structures have to foreground the challenges associated with changing climatic patterns.

Agriculture remains the largest user of water in India but policy has rarely acknowledged ecological concerns. We have water guzzling crops like sugarcane and paddy being grown in areas where agroclimatic conditions are not ideal. Policy has to retreat from poorly thought out interventions and move into areas where it can disseminate technology and practices which match cropping pattern with available rainfall patterns. These changes require the Centre to play a coordinating role between states and facilitate greater infusion of technology. While the progress of the southwest monsoon remains a matter of priority – 14% deficiency till July 10 – there should be a concurrent focus on the larger adaptation and mitigation responses.