Drought In Thar Essay
Anaias Bunz
Because the kingdom's main source of income had long been levies on caravans, its economy suffered after Bombay became a major port, and sea trade largely replaced trade along the traditional land routes. Maharawals Ranjit Singh and Bairi Sal Singh tried to reverse the economic decline, but the kingdom nevertheless became impoverished. To make matters worse, there was a severe drought and a resulting famine from 1895 to 1900, during the reign of Maharawal Salivahan Singh, which caused the widespread loss of the livestock upon which the increasingly agriculturally based kingdom had come to rely.
Drought is affecting school attendance in the affected areas. Overall, 15 million children in the Horn of Africa are now out of school and an additional estimated 3.3 million children are at risk of dropping out due to drought.
But recurrent droughts and increasing water insecurity need long-term investments in water, sanitation and hygiene services, water management, and climate-proof infrastructure. Climate change is leading to unpredictable variations in temperature and rainfall patterns, which is expected to increase, both in frequency and intensity.
The impacts of drought, heat, and erratic rainfall are varied, and have differing effects on urban and rural populations. In this section we will primarily focus on the effects on agriculture because maintaining food production through extreme climatic events is critical to the existence of stable societies.
Erratic rainfall patterns can mean both an increase and decrease of precipitation amounts. Decreased rainfall and drought can cause low yields and crop failure, depletion of surface and groundwater irrigation supplies, depletion of domestic water supplies, and an increase in wildfire potential (which will be discussed in a later section). Drought is a slow motion disaster, as water resource depletion is not a singular event; it builds as rains fail, heat increases, and supplies are exhausted.
Extreme rainfall events are also on the rise, and can be more of a fast motion disaster, with flash flooding and the resulting soil erosion. In rainfall dependent dryland agricultural systems, rapid loss of topsoil from an extreme rain event can prove catastrophic. If a farmer is not prepared for the undulation between extreme heat, drought, and extreme episodic rainfall events, then it can spell disaster through crop failure, topsoil loss, and infrastructure damage.
Surviving the acute effects of drought, extreme heat, and erratic rainfall is something that communities located in extreme climate conditions have to deal with on a regular basis, so there is a lot to learn by studying their habits, practices, and rules. The Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India, is the most densely populated area with a Warm Desert Climate (BWh) on the planet, with a population of around 25 million people and a population density of 83 people per square mile. Traditional knowledge and practices are adapted to the extreme conditions and have lead to a historically stable agricultural system in this marginal region.
In Rajasthan, there is a local saying about what climate conditions can be expected over long time periods. This was related to me by Rajendra Kumar, the senior program coordinator of the NGO GRAVIS Jodhpur, whose mission is to work with desert communities for the empowerment of the poor. The saying is that in a century of 100 years, there are 27 years of good rainfall. Another 63 years are mixed with some production. There are 7 years of drought, and 3 of extreme drought when even mothers and children separate, never to meet again[3].
This extreme drought condition is known locally as Trikal and is characterized by lack grain for food, fodder for livestock, and water for basic domestic needs. When it is said that if mother and child become separated they will never meet again, it is representing complete societal breakdown, where people are wandering in search of food and water to avoid dying of thirst and starvation. This condition is said to happen three times in a century, so you can only imagine the cultural memory of those years and how much that shapes the conservation and stockpiling of resources during good years. The Thar Desert area has been continually inhabited since it became a desert between 4,000-10,000 years ago[4], so this 100 year breakdown is coming from very real long standing observation.
The below list of simple drought resilience strategies represents an excellent collection of guiding directives to follow in adapting a site to drought, extreme heat and erratic precipitation. This list was provided by Ardhendu S. Chaterjee, who is the executive director of an NGO called Development Research Communication and Services Centre located in West Bengal, India, where they have impacted over million rural villagers since their work began in 1982. I have provided an expanded explanation for each topic heading. Overall, this is a design checklist for a site mitigation plan.
Another strategy to add to this list that is being implemented in the Thar desert relates not to increasing heat and drought, but to increasing intensity of storms and the threat of flash flooding. Although the rural landscape is fully designed for water harvesting and water infiltration to build groundwater resources, flooding is also accounted for through several strategies:
Designing a site to be resilient to the many faces of climate change is complex. Doing so requires accounting for drought and intense heat, as well as intense storms and flooding, and then fire. To design communities to withstand the multiple layers of threats demands an integrated and multi-faceted design system like permaculture. First natural forces are assessed, and then the design responds to those forces for both protection and utilization. But true resilience does not happen within the boundaries of one site. It happens by planning at the scale of communities and regions.
Drought is not a singular destructive event that a region would recover from, like a wildfire or hurricane. It is more of a persistent long term disaster that needs to be permanently adapted to. Areas that are prone to drought should be consistently building and storing essential resources as mentioned above to be ready to endure through the next dry spell or heat wave.
There are particular events within droughts that have an element of disaster, like extreme heat waves. Often times extreme heat threatens the lives of people, livestock, and wildlife. They also create the conditions for wildfire, which will be discussed in the next section.
Climate change is already affecting water access for people around the world, causing more severe droughts and floods. Increasing global temperatures are one of the main contributors to this problem. Climate change impacts the water cycle by influencing when, where, and how much precipitation falls. It also leads to more severe weather events over time. Increasing global temperatures cause water to evaporate in larger amounts, which will lead to higher levels of atmospheric water vapor and more frequent, heavy, and intense rains in the coming years.
As the ocean warms, freshwater glaciers around Earth begin to melt at an unsustainable rate, which results in rising sea levels. The freshwater from the melted glaciers eventually runs into the ocean. With the rising of sea levels, salt water can more easily contaminate underground freshwater-bearing rocks, called aquifers. A process called desalination removes salt from salt water, but it is a last-resort, energy-intensive, costly process for places where there are persistent droughts and freshwater is lacking. The Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean use desalination to produce freshwater out of necessity.
With agriculture and cattle rearing being the only means of livelihood for locals of Thar desert, persistent drought has forced residents to migrate to other regions within the state while many others continue to cope with cascading effects of drought, which hampers agricultural production, results in shortage of drinking water and fodder, and affects both, human and animal health. Crop loss and low purchasing power have pushed the region into poverty.
The rural population of Barmer depend on the government to provide relief during times of drought whose inefficient management of relief efforts pushes them towards the common practice of seasonal migration.
This strange phenomenon where the district has registered an increase in average rainfall over the years but also had to face drought almost every year in the last decade has posed a challenge in this largely rainfed agricultural region. While the average rainfall of the district was 275 mm in the last 10 years, it is 343 mm at present.
India is the seventh largest country in the world and is ranked second in population with 1,320,844,000 people. Located in South Asia, with the Indian Ocean to the south, the Arabian Sea to the southwest and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. The Himalayas along with the Thar desert form the northern boundary of India. India has a total area of 1,222,550 square miles which is divided up into 29 separate states. Although India is one of the most populated countries, 67.6% of its population still resides in rural areas. The Himalayas play an important role in India's climate protecting it from the cold Central Asian winds keeping the country warmer than other countries at similar latitudes. India has a monsoon climate with hot wet weather from June until September and cooler dryer weather from October until February. The average winter temperatures in India are 50-59 *Fahrenheit, and the average summer temperatures are 90-104 *Fahrenheit. The monsoon rainfall is unpredictable year to year and in years of low rainfall drought frequently occurs.
Under this classification. if drought occurs in 20 % of the years in any area, it is classified as drought prone area and if the drought occurs in more than 40 % of the years. it is classified as chronically drought prone area.
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