Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A revival in India’s monsoon rains is helping ease dry weather that’s caused drought in a third of the nation’s districts and dented sowing of rice and sugar cane, a weather bureau official said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said that there was “no need to panic” as the nation has “adequate stock of wheat and rice” to face the drought.
Uttar Pradesh, the country’s biggest cane grower, Madhya Pradesh, the largest soybeans producer, and Bihar, a top grower of rice and corn, received “good rain” over the past few days, said Ajit Tyagi, director general of the India Meteorological Department, from New Delhi today.
The monsoon season, which brings about three-quarters of the nation’s annual rainfall, may be the driest in seven years, Tyagi said last week, curbing farm output in the world’s second- biggest producer of rice, wheat and sugar. As many as 209 of 626 districts have declared drought, the farm ministry said.
“A lot of paddy crop has been saved in Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh because of irrigation,” Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar told reporters in New Delhi earlier today before a meeting of chief ministers with Singh to discuss the drought. Recent rains may have helped the crops, he said.
Rice, the nation’s biggest monsoon-sown crops, has been the worst hit: the crop area has fallen 19 percent from a year ago to 24.7 million hectares as of Aug. 12, the farm ministry said. Cane has been planted to 4.25 million hectares, compared with 4.38 million hectares a year earlier.
More Electricity
The government will divert more electricity to farmers so that pumps can be run for longer hours to draw water from tube- wells for irrigating fields, Chandrashekar said. Farmers will be asked to sow short-duration crops, such as oilseeds and lentils, to counter the fall in farm output, he said.
India’s farmers will have to increase the area of coverage in the winter crop to “salvage” the losses in the monsoon crop, Farm Minister Sharad Pawar said in a statement posted on the government’s Web site today. “Every effort has to be taken to contain and moderate” price increases, including controlling speculative tendencies in the market, he said.
Fuel Subsidy
Pawar last month said the government will give a 10-billion rupee subsidy for diesel used to operate water pumps. The assistance hasn’t reached farmers, said Sukhbir Singh Badal, deputy chief minister of Punjab, the nation’s top grower of rice and wheat.
“Farmers should have got free diesel by now,” he told reporters in New Delhi. “If we get more subsidized power and diesel, we may be able to save the paddy crop and match the target” of 13.7 million tons, he said.
Monsoon rain may be similar to 2002, when showers were 19.2 percent below average and the nation faced its worst drought in 12 years, Tyagi said last week. The deficit since the start of this season on June 1 has widened to 29 percent as of Aug. 12, from 25 percent a week ago, the weather bureau said last week.
Falls were 43 percent below average in the northwest, which includes states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Shortfall was 23 percent in peninsular India, which includes Maharashtra, the second-biggest grower of sugar cane and cotton.
The weather office has pared the forecast for August rain to between 85-to-90 percent of the long-period average from 101 percent predicted in June. Showers in July, the wettest month in the June-September season, were more than predicted, following the driest June in 83 years.
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