Climate change threatens India's monsoons

One of India's leading meteorologists has given warning that in Central India the "days of long duration rains are almost gone".

In a study of monsoon patterns in India over the last 150 years, BN Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said global warming had made India's weather more unpredictable.

He said there were now longer dry spells and shorter sudden heavy showers, replacing the three month continuous rain which has characterised the Indian monsoon.

His comments will fuel fears that climate change will cause increasing hardship for farmers in India, where the failure of the monsoon has already reduced food output by 20 per cent. Ministers reduced the country's growth projection this year by just under two per cent as drought hit crops throughout the country.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee this week said there had been a 25 per cent decline in rainfall this monsoon in 252 districts throughout ten states, while in Maharashtra crop yields fell by more than 40 per cent.

The increasing failure of the monsoon has been attributed to a number of factors including temperatures rising by an average on 0.5 degrees Celsius over the last hundred years, receding Himalayan glaciers and rising sea levels. Intensive farming in land reclaimed from tropical forests in the south of India, and the irrigation of farmland in the dusty northern plains have also affected the monsoon, delaying its arrival from June into July.

"It is a warning to our policy-makers and a challenge for the people to adapt to new rainfall trends," Mr Goswami said.