Western disturbances are causing rain damage even in eastern India

As summer approaches in Jharkhand, mahua flowers begin blossoming by the end of March. The warm and dry conditions are ideal for harvesting the mahua flowers as they fall to the ground. But rainfall and hailstorms in late March and early April have disrupted this delicate process.

“This time due to the rains, many flowers started rotting when they were laid out to dry,” said Kuldeep Minj, a farmer from Jharkhand’s Latehar district.

Traditionally, mahua flowers are not plucked from trees but gathered from the ground and then dried under sunlight for up to three days to be properly preserved. “If the flowers don’t dry properly they start to get sticky and rot,” said Minj, who usually harvests flowers from trees on his land and a nearby forest.

Up north in Punjab, farmers were expecting a rich yield from wheat. “The quality of the crop this year was excellent,” said Jagmeet Singh, a farmer from Kotli village of Punjab’s Sri Muktsar Sahib district. “Otherwise, we usually had to spray insecticides worth Rs 1,000-1,500 per acre.”

That was until April 4.

Two weeks before Singh was to harvest his crop, a sudden hailstorm dashed all his hopes. “The hailstorm lasted for only 35-40 minutes but damaged almost 80% of the crop,” said Singh. “Never in my life have I seen a hailstorm in the season of wheat harvest.”

The rain and hailstorms were the result of an active western disturbance.

These are cyclonic winds that develop over the Mediterranean region and move westwards, bringing snow and rain in the Himalayas and north-western India. But this year, even farmers in eastern India have felt the impact.

Western disturbances are not unusual for this time of the year but there has been a change in the behaviour and timing of these weather systems, say experts.

“Usually, we find western disturbances being active in January and February,” said Anand Sharma, former deputy director general of the regional meteorology centre at Dehradun. “Now, we are seeing that it is being more active in March and April – this year it seems to be like that.”

The India Meteorological Department data shows that India experienced 27% more rainfall than the normal for this season between March and early April.

Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said warming seas could be intensifying the western disturbances. The interaction with a warmer, moister Arabian Sea and nearby regions may have resulted in heavier rain, intense movement of heat and moisture, which can lead to more damaging hail and storm activity, said Koll.

“Their characteristics…may be shifting in ways that can increase agricultural risk during sensitive crop stages,” said Koll.

The Centre estimates that rain and hail has damaged standing rabi crops across almost 2.5 lakh hectares as of April 8, said agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Rabi crops are sown during the winter and harvested in late spring.

Scroll spoke to farmers in Punjab, Rajasthan and Jharkhand and found that wheat, mustard, chickpeas, and forest produce like mahua had suffered the most damage.

Heavy rain, huge losses

In Punjab, excess rain in early April caused water-logging in wheat fields across the state. The state recorded 20mm of rainfall, against the normal of 3.3mm, according to the Punjab meteorological department.

Around 1.31 lakh acres of standing wheat, the main rabi crop, was affected, said the Punjab government. Districts like Fazilka, Moga, Sri Muktsar Sahib, Bathinda, Mansa and Tarn Taran are the worst hit.

Between April 2 and April 8, east and north-east India saw 51% more rainfall than usual, central India saw 57% above normal rain, and the northwest witnessed 3% more than normal rain, according to the India Meteorological Department.

Jharkhand recorded 9.1mm of rain, 201% more than the usual 3.1 mm, in the first week of April. The India Meteorological Department noted that the state experienced rain, hail, gusty winds and thunderstorms almost the entire week.

Koll said that rains that reached eastern India, including Jharkhand, may have been a result of the same large-scale western disturbance. But the rain may also have been affected by moisture from the Bay of Bengal, local instability, and convective processes over eastern India, said Koll.

Minj, from Jharkhand’s Latehar district, said that four to five days of continuous rain in the area had damaged four to five quintals of mahua flowers. “This is a loss of Rs 5,000-6,000,” he said. In Mahuadanr block, mahua flowers are sold for Rs 50 to 60 per kilo. “The rain also impacts the colour and taste of the flowers, and so the ones that survive fetch a lower price in the market.”

For small-time farmers like Jagmeet Singh in Punjab, the losses are mounting. “I have incurred a total loss of Rs 8-9 lakh due to the rainfall,” he said. He had taken loans anticipating a good harvest. Singh owns five acres of land but also cultivates 15 acres of land on a contract of Rs 75,000 for two crops a year. He also spends Rs 30,000 per acre for two crops in a single year.

Singh has paid one installment to the landlord but the next payment is looming. “Had there been no hailstorm, I would have easily earned Rs 20,000 per acre on the land I have taken on contract,” he said. “Now, I have to look for means to pay the remaining amount to the landlord while I earned nothing from this land.”

“Our situation is really bad.”

Hail destroys wheat crops, mahua

Apart from the rainfall, hailstorms have proved to be especially destructive this year.

In Rajasthan’s Bikaner district, farmer Kailash Jhakar said hail and rainfall in April were not unheard of, but they had become a lot more frequent in the last five years. What shocked Jhakar was the hail, as big as lemons, which completely destroyed crops in at least 11 villages of tehsil Lunkaransar.

“It was mostly wheat and isabgol,” said Jhakar, explaining that since isabgol, or psyllium husk, is a short plant, the hail completely destroyed it. “Once the hail covers the crop, anything under it gets completely spoiled,” he said.

In the case of wheat, the rains first bent the crop and then the hail “brought it to the ground completely”, leaving nothing to harvest.

Rajasthan recorded 535% more rain than normal in early April, according to the state office of India Meteorological Department.

Hanumangarh district, bordering Bikaner, recorded 812% more rain than normal for the period. Here, wheat is the dominant rabi crop, followed by mustard and chickpea. Typically, farmers harvest mustard and chickpea by late March and wheat by April 15. When rain and hail battered the region between April 2 to April 8, wheat was ready to be harvested and sold, but still on the fields.

“It is not the rain that causes so much damage, but the hail,” said Charanpreet Singh, a farmer and the district coordinator of Bharat Kisan Union. “With hail, nothing is left of the crop. It is not even worth giving it to cattle.”

In Jharkhand’s Bolba block of Simdega district, farmer Raghunandan Singh and his family usually harvest mahua flowers from about 60 sixty trees, some on their land and others in a nearby forest. In good conditions, they can collect 12 kg to 15 kg of flowers per day – each kilo of flowers sells for Rs 42 - Rs 45 in Bolba.

“...Hailstorms damaged almost 40% of the flowers in the trees,” said Singh. “After that the continued rain didn’t allow us to dry the remaining 60% of the flowers properly.”

Migrating to earn money

In regions like Jharkhand where agriculture depends on the rain, forest produce such as mahua and sal flowers provide farmers a steady stream of income from March to May until monsoon.

Raghunandan Singh said there were virtually no irrigation facilities in Bolba block, which had suffered due to the rain. Many were pushed to seasonally migrate for work because of the loss of income from mahua flowers, he said.

Minj from Mahuadanr block in Latehar district said many people in the region relied on the money earned from mahua flowers to buy paddy seeds and prepare for the sowing season in May and June. “Now people will have to take up wage labour to earn that money,” he said.

Hoping for compensation

With several weeks to go for the monsoon to arrive, farmers in Punjab and Rajasthan are hoping that compensation will help them tide over the losses from unseasonal weather.

Charanpreet Singh of Hanumangarh district in Rajasthan estimated that the damage to wheat crops was spread across almost 9,000 acres. “One acre gives a farmer a guaranteed Rs 60,000 upon sale of wheat,” he said.

He has submitted a letter to the district office requesting support. “Each year, the district collector’s office initiates a survey for damage, but so far in the previous years, no farmers had received compensation,” said Singh. In Bikaner, Jhakar said the tehsildar’s office had started damage assessment on the ground.

Experts, however, note that hailstorms occur in patches, limiting damage to those areas. “Individual farmers would have suffered damage, but it is not the case that all farmers across the state would have had the same extent of damage since hailstorms have a patchy nature,” said Sharma, the former deputy director general of the Dehradun regional meteorology centre.