India's experience with drought management: Changed perspectives and challenges

This document describes the drought situation in India over the years, the earlier perspective at drought management and the gradual change in perspective at managing droughts that evolved over the years.

Prior to independence, measures to tackle famine and minimise deaths due to starvation were evolved and followed. However, there were no mechanisms to monitor droughts scientifically and technologically to prepare and take measures to minimise the impacts of droughts beforehand.Crisis management was the only solution.

Thus, the challenges at drought management included:

• Developing, and coordinating an institutional mechanism that could monitor/ predict/ warn occurrence of drought; its intensity, duration, area, impact and the immediate and long-term mitigation measures required.
• Response management that included assessment of losses, governing relief operations and managing long-term measures for prevention

In recent years however, the strategy has gradually shifted from the crisis management approach of providing relief when the drought occurs to the risk management approach that includes forecasting and early warning, immediate relief in the short-term and drought proofing measures in the long-term.

Results indicate that:

• Deaths due to starvation are no longer encountered due to huge buffer stocks of foodgrains and wide public distribution network.
• An early warning system is in place and drought monitoring is done regularly, frequently at GOI and state government levels.
• Institutional mechanisms are in place for measurements, observations, research, forecasting, monitoring based on ground-based data and remote sensing data.
• Institutional mechanisms are in place for disseminating weather forecasts, crop forecasts, contingency crop plans and so on so that they reach the farmers and others affected.
• Institutional mechanisms are in place at the highest executive and political levels in the central and state governments for funding and administration of drought relief operations.

Successful drought management depends on successful water management and other measures like afforestation, combating desertification and creating conditions of alternative livelihoods for people in drought affected areas. It also depends how successful are our meteorologists, hydrologists and agricultural scientists and their models are in forecasting drought and the EWS they design. Traditional technologies used by our farmers are of immense value in combating drought at less cost
The document ends by suggesting that India’s successful experience in drought management can be used as amodel for other countries facing similar situations.

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