Truant monsoon

IT IS VERY likely that a study of the behaviour of the northeast monsoon would reveal that over the years it has either more often not arrived on time during October and November or totally failed - as it has happened this year - to fill the Coromandel coast with despondency. The consequence of this is acutely felt during the ensuing summer months from April onwards when the wells and water resources dry up to precipitate an agonising scarcity of drinking water particularly in Chennai and southern Tamil Nadu and to force the State Government to plead with neighbouring Andhra Pradesh to share its Krishna waters.

The extent to which the erratic monsoon is leaving Tamil Nadu bone dry could be seen from the deficiency of the rainfall in its scattered regions amounting to even less than a third of what it should normally have been. An irony of the rainfall scene in Tamil Nadu is that it is almost entirely skipped by the southwest monsoon which fully benefits the rest of the country after hitting Kerala during summer when it is eagerly looked forward to and badly needed. This is because of the towering western ghats having placed Tamil Nadu in the rain shadow region to leave it parched under a blazing sun. Hopes about the cyclonic storm bringing an abundant rainfall during November despite the devastating destruction it would have caused faded because of the downpour generally turning out to be scanty. The winter of December and January has further dried up the area which has had poor or no rainfall. The announcement by the Meteorological Department about the ``withdrawal'' of the northeast monsoon on January 6 had a ring of despair over its having turned out to be a truant.

The recurring truculence of the northeast monsoon has indeed been baffling and thrown up questions on why it often fails. A possible explanation is that unlike the southwest monsoon the near certainty of which is attributed to the relationship between the pressure and the winds in the southern and the impact of the Earth's rotation in the northern latitudes, the northeast monsoon is localised to the Bay of Bengal region extending from coastal Tamil Nadu right up to West Bengal. In fact, there seems to be very little to make it a natural phenomenon in comparison with the southwest monsoon brought about by winds and the movement of the Earth. Expectations about the northeast monsoon turning out to be plentiful more often than not depend upon the occurrence of ``depressions in the Bay'' characterised by cyclonic storms the devastation brought about by which are more pronounced than the abundance of rainfall. The irregularity of the monsoon resulted in its having gone unnoticed in his Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater who seemed to regard it as being accidental instead of as something seasonal. Quite a striking feature of the northeast monsoon is that when it turns out to be devastating with the damage it inflicts, it has often veered away from the coastal southern region where it is being very much looked forward to and moved far to inflict its fury on Bangladesh.

A question which capricious monsoons throw up is whether nothing could be done to save the country from an abject dependence upon them. The answer lies partly in ensuring against the excessive run-off of water brought about by floods resulting from heavy rainfall resulting from an impoverishing deforestation. Unfortunately in spite of what is quite well known about lush greenery richly influencing rich cloud formation and downpour and the gains to be reaped from extended afforestation, narrow and eventually destructive commercial interests continue to destroy the forest cover. If this has either brought a thin cloud formation or a total absence of it, it is the price extracted by industrial vandalism which alienates monsoons.

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