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What Is Drought?: Droughts and Famines in India
What Is Drought?: Droughts and Famines in India
What Is Drought?: Droughts and Famines in India
What is drought?
Drought is a serious natural hazard that has severe implications for the
affected region. It can be defined as:
a protracted period of deficient precipitation resulting in
extensive damage to crops, resulting in loss of yield
In more technical terms it is defined as:
a period of abnormally dry weather sufficiently prolonged for
the lack of water to cause serious hydrologic imbalance in the
affected area.
What is famine?
Famine in its simplest terms can be defined as the extreme scarcity of
food.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Reference
Table (the standard used by the UN), famine occurs when the first three of
the following conditions occur:
20 percent of population has fewer than 2,100 kilocalories of food a
day
30 percent of children are acutely malnourished
Two deaths per 10,000 people, or four deaths per 10,000 children per
day
Pandemic illness
Access to less than four liters of water per day
Large-scale displacement
Civil strife
Complete loss of assets and source of income
The severe drought like conditions are the result of climatic imbalances
caused by the failure of the monsoon. In recent times there have been no
famines mainly because of the availability of a buffer stock of foodgrains,
better transportation and storage facilities as well as greatly improved
logistics because of application of technology. Over and above the
Government of India has adopted Food security as a prime motto. Major
famines in recorded history have taken a heavy toll of many millions. There
have been in all about 14 major famines in India since the 11 th century. Each
of them has caused tremendous suffering and depopulated particular regions
due to starvation deaths. A few of the famines which left behind death and
devastation were
1. The great famine of 1630-32 which affected present day Gujarat and the
Deccan
2. The great Bengal famine of 1770
3. The Chalisa famine of 1783-84 which affected much of northern and
central India including present day Delhi, Uttar- Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan,
Kashmir and Punjab
4. The Doji bara or the skull famine of 1791-92 which affected the old
Hyderabad and the Southern Maratha regions.
5. The Bengal famine of 1943
2. Tapping river water and building canals for diverting such water to deficit
areas, this will also help to tackle the recurring problem of floods. Damming
of major rivers and creating reservoir capacity. There are however serious
limits to creation of artificial irrigation facilities in the Indian context.
3. Both the Central and the State govts have been open to ideas such as
artificial rain through cloud seeding and desalination of seawater given our
large marine resources