Rain shortfall destroys crops, upends farmers' lives in Karnataka

Traditionally, August and September are the months when the farmers of Dharwad, Haveri and Gadag districts in Karnataka deploy labourers or harvest machines to reap green gram, soybean, chilli, onion, maize and cotton crops. But this year, Gangadhar Badnikai, a farmer at Kusugal village in Dharwad, deployed a tractor on his 10 acres of land to destroy the standing green gram crop. The plants were withering away, with barely any chance of revival, following the erratic monsoon.

Pinning high hopes on a good monsoon, Gangadhar had sowed green gram, a 90-day crop, on his entire field. The farmer had spent Rs 15,000 per acre on seeds, fertiliser and labourers. But with his taluk receiving deficit rainfall in July and August, he was left with no other option but to destroy the crops to minimise losses.

“In order to save my crop I have to either drill borewells or hire water tankers. Both of these options will cost more than the revenue I will earn,” says Gangadhar.

His case is not a unique one. Officials from the Karnataka Department of Agriculture point out that they received multiple reports of farmers destroying green gram, groundnut, maize and other crops in Gajendragad and Laxmeshwar in Gadag and Shiggaon and Rattihalli in Haveri.

“With a heavy heart, I ran my tractor over my maize crops. I can use the money I saved by not continuing cultivation further, to buy seeds for rabi crops,” says Gadigeppa Harijan of Suranagi village from Laxmeshwar taluk, Gadag.

Among the 23 taluks of Dharwad, Gadag and Haveri districts, 16 have been declared by the state government as severely drought-hit.

The situation is no different in the Malnad region of Karnataka, where Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru, Mysuru and Hassan districts experienced the highest rainfall deficit this season (ranging from 44% in Hassan to 60% in Kodagu and Chikkamagaluru).

India ended the 2023 monsoon season with below-normal rainfall – for the first time since 2018 – with the country receiving 94% of the average precipitation that normally occurs between June and September. Even though it escaped the devastation of a full blown El Nino, over 200 districts received deficient or scanty rainfall. The deficit adversely affected south interior Karnataka, Kerala and a large part of eastern India.

The four-month-long season ended with the country recording a 5.6% shortfall. The overall deficiency was much more for the east, northwest and southern peninsula, which saw a 60% deficit in August.

Paddy cultivation suffers

Cracked paddy fields and withering seedlings have become a common sight in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Kodagu and Chikkamagaluru as paddy cultivation was particularly affected due to erratic monsoons.

“Paddy requires good rainfall for the growth of saplings. The delay in monsoon hit the transplantation of paddy seedlings and sowing. With deficit rainfall, farmers had to pump water from nearby water sources to save the crop,” says paddy grower Manohar Shetty from Kuppepadavu in Dakshina Kannada. Depleting groundwater levels due to sporadic rain limits that option too.

Karnataka is estimated to have suffered a loss of more than 50% of the crop this season due to drought. The state is likely to see crop damage amounting to nearly 58 lakh tonnes, which is 52% of the total food production target for the southwest monsoon season. 

The government estimates that crops spanning 40 lakh hectares of land have been damaged, with paddy, ragi and jowar being affected the most.

Further down south, Kerala suffered a 34% rain deficit — the highest shortfall received by any state this season. According to Kerala Agriculture Department sources, nearly 600 ha of paddy cultivation areas were impacted in Palakkad, Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram districts, striking the livelihoods of nearly 1,100 farmers, with crop loss estimated to amount to about Rs nine crore.

Palakkad Karshaka (Farmers) Samajam President Mani Mudhalamthodu says there will be a drastic decline in yield owing to lack of sufficient water, especially for paddy crops. 

Water levels of dams are at alarmingly low levels, he adds. Compounding woes is the fact that Kerala has also not received adequate water from Tamil Nadu as per water-sharing agreements. This comes at a time when high production costs and delays in clearing procurement dues have already put farmers in distress. Many have quit cultivation, because of which paddy cultivation in Kerala has come down from 8.75 lakh ha during the 1970s to just about 1.75 lakh ha now.

In West Bengal too, paddy cultivation dropped by nearly 2.5 lakh ha due to inadequate rainfall in the western part of the state. The worst affected district was Purulia, followed by Bankura and Birbhum.

“This year, the crop is not even half of the usual figure. We had showers in July and August, but the rain was insufficient compared to last year. This is the time for Aaman (summer) paddy, and we sow around June. But out of the six acres of land I generally cultivate, I have been able to use only two acres due to lack of rain,” says Chakradhar Mahato, a resident of Kalapathar village in Purulia, around 250 km from Kolkata.

Farmers like Mahato depend completely on monsoon rain for their crop. “In our observations, the shortfall of rain this year during July and August has affected farmers in Birbhum and Purulia. This is likely to affect over 50% of crop yield in these districts,” says Amal Halder, West Bengal State Committee Secretary, All India Kisan Sabha.

Other crops affected

Beyond paddy cultivation, the deficit rainfall has affected pulses and oilseeds in the east. In Karnataka, the brunt was borne by commercial crops like coffee, black pepper and coconut palm.

Coffee is cultivated on nearly 1,07,000 ha in Kodagu and 90,000 ha in Chikkamagaluru districts. “Without rain, berry borer disease has infested the coffee berries in several plantations. Due to the scorching temperature, the berries have turned black. The growers could also not apply the required fertilisers due to the lack of rainfall,” says Jayaram, former president of the Karnataka Growers’ Federation.

The economy of the coffee-growing districts of Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru and Hassan will take a hit, says Mudigere Taluk Growers Association President Balakrishna Balur.

Rain deficit has also struck black pepper cultivation, as rainwater plays a major role in the pollination of pepper plants. “Due to the lack of rain, there was no proper sprouting of spikes, and the spikes which grew are void of peppercorns,” says farmer A P Sadashiv from Puttur in Dakshina Kannada.

In the central Karnataka districts of Chitradurga, Davangere and Shivamogga, farmers claim that 75% of their crops have either died or are on the verge of dying due to scanty rainfall this monsoon.

Groundnut, Chitradurga’s major crop, has almost dried up. It was sown on over 1.10 lakh ha, but a ‘no-show’ of the monsoon in August — a record-breaking three-week-long period of no rain — led to fast deterioration of the crops. Even though the farmers made an attempt to save the crops using water from borewells, their efforts were futile.

The acreage of pulses has declined by 8.3% led by lower sowing of arhar or tur dal (which declined by 5.1%) and urad (which declined by 13.8%) compared with last year. In Maharashtra, the total area of pulses cultivation in the 2023-24 kharif season has come down to 15.97 lakh ha from 18.69 lakh hectares in the previous season, a reduction of 14.56%.

The tur bowl of the Kalyana Karnataka region saw an 82% deficit in rainfall this August. In Kalaburagi district alone, farmers had sowed tur on 5.83 lakh ha out of the 8.56 lakh ha of farmland. But crop wilting, caused by monsoon failure in June and August remains a major worry, even though a few districts reported erratic rainfall this month.

“I had sown tur in five acres, and it was on the verge of drying up. Now, the heavy showers have damaged the standing crop. I may hardly get a yield of two quintals per acre instead of the expected five quintals. I am struggling to get back the Rs 25,000 that I invested in sowing the crop,” says Mangalamurthy, a farmer from Gadikeshwar village in Kalaburagi.

Impact on farmers

In the absence of sufficient crop insurance facilities, farmers are the worst affected, says G V Ramanjaneyulu at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in Hyderabad. “Farmers can be educated on using alternative crops if drought-like conditions are understood in advance. And with improved weather models and technological advancements nowadays, it is not so difficult to predict drought conditions,” he observes.

Ramanjaneyulu notes that immediately after the formation of Telangana, an attempt was made by the state to rewrite the drought code, encompassing the preventive measures that were to be taken to mitigate those conditions. Unfortunately, the new code never came into force, and was pushed into cold storage.

With the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecasting a normal winter monsoon, can farmers in Tamil Nadu, coastal and southern Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and south interior Karnataka hope for a better winter crop to make up at least a part of the losses? Experts keep their fingers crossed.

According to R H Patil, an agro-meteorologist at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, the scattered rains witnessed in October will not help much in the rabi sowing, as the soil’s moisture content has not reached the desired level. “As the situation is uncertain, rabi sowing is going to be risky. There will be some respite in the rabi season only if we receive good rains in October,” he notes.

Government action 

To address the consequences of the poor monsoon, the government has introduced export restrictions for rice, and a ban on sugar exports may be in the offing. Last year, the government decided to stop the export of wheat and broken rice in an effort to tame inflation. But consequent to the poor monsoon this season, the government imposed a ban on the export of non-Basmati rice since July 20. Also, there is a 20% export duty on parboiled rice.

With many sugarcane-growing districts receiving poor rain, sugar production is also expected to decline this year. As a consequence, the Union government may announce a ban on the export of sugar soon. There is, however, sufficient stock for domestic demand and ethanol production.

Karnataka Agricultural Price Commission Former President Prakash Kammardi says that what we are witnessing is not a common drought, but a weather calamity induced due to climate change. "At the national level, we may not find a dip in the production of all foodgrains as certain parts of the country have received sufficient rain," he explains.

Karnataka and the northeastern states were the worst affected due to the drought this year. There could be a shortage of tur and pulses in Karnataka. “The prices of pulses, more specifically, tur, can witness a steep hike this year. Cereals and vegetables like onions may also see price hikes as production has reduced,” he adds. 

Kammardi advises the state government to stock up on paddy and more importantly, fodder, for cattle to mitigate the impact of drought. “Climate vagaries will become a norm in the future. The government and research institutes should accept this and plan accordingly. They must concentrate on developing crops that are climate resilient,” he adds.

(Anchored by Kalyan Ray with inputs from Manjunath Hegde Bomnalli in Hubballi, Nrupathunga S K in Davangere, Vittal Shastri in Kalaburagi, Naina J A in Mangaluru, Shruti H M from Bengaluru, Pavan Kumar H in Hubballi, Mohammed Safi Shamsi from Kolkata, Arjun Raghunath from Thiruvananthapuram, S N V Sudhir from Hyderabad and Mritunjay Bose in Mumbai)