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Risk and the South Asian monsoon

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Abstract

South Asia’s dependence on the monsoon has always been a source of economic uncertainty. This paper examines the history of ways of thinking about the monsoon and risk, focusing on India. The science of meteorology, and a growing interest in ways to mitigate monsoon risk, developed in response to major famines. Piecemeal interventions, including a series of canals and small dams, began India’s hydraulic transformation. By the middle of the twentieth century, massive hydraulic engineering emerged as the dominant solution to controlling the monsoon’s risks. Large dams account for the largest share of government expenditure in independent India, but since the 1960s, intensive and mostly unregulated groundwater exploitation has played a greater role in meeting irrigation needs. The expansion in India’s irrigated area and an expansion in food production. But this has come at a cost: millions have been displaced by dam construction; groundwater exploitation has reached unsustainable levels, and has had an effect on regional climate.

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Notes

  1. This article focuses on India, but takes South Asia to include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka.

  2. Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to B.J.K. Hallowes (Deputy Commissioner, Allahabad and President of the Famine Relief Fund of Gonda), 26 June 1929, in Gopal and Iyengar (2003): 12.

  3. Nehru’s speech on the inauguration of the Hirakud Dam in 1948 (Singh 1988).

  4. Chinese dam building outstrips India’s by a significant margin: China is home to 22,000 large dams, almost half the world’s total.

  5. The phrase “taming of chance” is from Ian Hacking’s work on the history of probability and statistics (Hacking 1990).

  6. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Social Aspects of Small and Big Projects,” Inaugural address at the 29th annual meeting of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power, New Delhi, November 17 1958, in Singh (1988): 172–75

  7. Full speech available at: http://lasulawsenvironmental.blogspot.in/2012/07/indira-gandhis-speech-at-stockholm.html, last accessed Dec 18 2015.

  8. In February-March 2015 I conducted a series of interviews with Indian meteorologists, many of them now retired; the results of this work will appear in a separate article.

  9. Shah (2009, 2010) argues this is evidence of the prevalence of “colonial irrigation thinking.” Focusing on surface irrigation, the state continues to neglect of policies of managed groundwater recharge—arguably more important and more effective—while allowingthe persistence of the electricity subsidies that create perverse incentives to maximize groundwater extraction.

  10. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/05/india-river-link-plan-progress-slow, last accessed 4 May 2015.

  11. Supreme Court of India. Writ Petition (Civil) No. 512 of 2002 in Re. Networking of Rivers, judgment at http://courtnic.nic.in/supremecourt/temp/512200232722012p.txt, accessed May 14 2015.

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Acknowledgments

The research for this paper received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC, Grant Agreement 284053, which I held at Birkbeck College, University of London from 2012 to 2015.

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  1. Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1 Bow Street, 3rd Floor, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Sunil S. Amrith

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Correspondence to Sunil S. Amrith.

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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Historicizing Climate Change” edited by Melissa Lane, John R. McNeill, Robert H. Socolow, Sverker Sörlin.

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Amrith, S.S. Risk and the South Asian monsoon. Climatic Change 151, 17–28 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1629-x

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