The EconomistJune 29th 2019 391Essay The South Asian monsoon
The cloud messenger
W
ith rheumyeyes and a face wizened by the sun, Narayan-
appa looks down to the ground and then, slowly, up to the
skies. After weeks of harsh heat his land, one and a half hectares
(four acres) of peanuts, chillies and mulberry bushes, has turned
to dust. At the beginning of June, a dozen families local to Kuppam,
a village in the Chittoor district of the south-eastern state of An-
dhra Pradesh, came together, as they do every year, to sacrifice a
goat as a divine downpayment on a good monsoon. By mid-June
the monsoon rains should be quenching the parched ground. Yet
there is no sign of the livid clouds running up from the south-east-
ern horizon which serve as its evening harbingers, rising and roil-
ing, filling the sky with their rumbling and the night with veiled
lightning. The sky is as blank as the ground is dry. Narayanappa has
his sacks of nuts ready to sow. But time is running out.
In his office at the India Meteorological Department in New
Delhi, Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, the department’s boss, looks at
portents which are dry in a different way—figures and lines on pa-
per and screens. Where once the oncoming monsoon was spotted
through telescopes on the veranda of the observatory built by the
Maharajah of Travancore on a hill above Thiruvananthapuram
(formerly Trivandrum) in Kerala, now the signs of its coming are
looked for through tracked radar and satellites. But they are still of
intense interest to the country’s rulers, and its people. The mon-
soon’s arrival in Thiruvananthapuram at the beginning of June
marks the official beginning of India’s rainy season. The rains’ sub-
sequent movement is tracked on a daily basis by national televi-
sion stations, rather like the advance of the spring cherry blossomin Japan but with far greater human consequence.
A century of meteorological progress means that Mr Rajeevan
can say with much more confidence than his predecessors how
fast the summer monsoon will sweep up the nation and how much
rain, overall, it will bring. When the monsoon started late this year
he could give a convincing non-goat-related reason; Cyclone Vayu,
in the Arabian Sea, upset the flows on which the monsoon de-
pends. But though meteorology has improved, it has a long way to
go. On average the monsoon is a regular wave of rain, rising and
falling over the months from June to September. In any given year,
though, the smooth wave is overwritten by spikes and troughs,
bursts of intense precipitation and weeks of odd dryness, varia-
tions known as “vagaries” which science still struggles to grasp.
There is a complex structure in space, as well as time. Some
places may be almost completely skirted by the rains. Others see
deluges violent enough to destroy crops and carry away soil, the
water running off the land before it can be caught and stored. The
flooding that goes with such rains is expected to become worse
and wider-spread as the global climate warms. Agriculture re-
mains the Indian economy’s largest source of jobs, directly ac-
counting for a sixth of its gdpand employing almost half of its
working people. A bad monsoon can knock Indian economic
growth by a third. The effects in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Paki-
stan and Sri Lanka are on a similar scale. Almost a quarter of the
world—1.76bn souls—lives with the South Asian monsoon.
As Guy Fleetwood Wilson, a finance minister, put it in 1909, the
“budget of India is a gamble in rain.” Thanks to Mr Rajeevan and hisKUPPAM, ANDHRA PRADESH AND MAWSYNRAM, MEGHALAYA
In India every year sees the coming together of moist air and hot land, climate and history, hope and fear