Dr Harsh Vardhan, who swapped Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for Ministry of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, in early November last year made a crucial announcement. He said the country saved Rs 42,000 crore last year due to timely weather forecasts.
He was quoting from a report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) that says 11.5 million farmers received such advance weather information leading to an economic profit to the tune Rs 42,000 crores to GDP.
NCAER conducted a third party audit of forecast services provided to farmers during 2015. The honourable minister was also bullish about expanding the net of such services to all farmers and achieve an estimated Rs 3.20 lakh crores.
The pronouncement is extremely crucial from two standpoints. This is a first of its kind of study that corroborates that weather information services help farmers save significantly. During the life cycle of any crop, weather predictions can help the peasants decide the appropriate time to apply farm inputs like fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation.
For example, a timely weather forecast of rainfall will help the farmer identify the right time for spraying his fields so that the precious farm inputs are not washed away. Also, the farmer can save on hiring a pump for irrigation (half the country is rain fed and pumps play a crucial role even in irrigated areas for last mile connectivity) and the energy costs associated with it if he knows it is going to rain soon.
Likewise, the advance knowledge of no rains and/or rising temperatures will prompt the farmer to arrange for water and save his crop. Similarly, there are numerous benefits to be enjoyed by knowing how temperature, humidity, wind and sun (cloud cover) will behave in the next few days.
The minister's statement not only confirms these individual gains at a macro level but the staggering scale of the economic profit. Interestingly, the study covered only four principal crops. The actual economic benefits from timely weather forecasts may well be many times the figure of Rs 42,000 crores if all agricultural and horticultural crops are accounted for.
The other important aspect is the huge impetus the weather industry is likely to receive now that it has been gifted a piece of statistics that outshines a hundred pilots and board room presentations. Though India Meteorological Department is the fountainhead of weather information for state run farmer extension services including Krishi Vigyan Kendras, private players like Skymet Weather and Express Weather have been active in this space for years. Apps like Farmneed have pioneered weather based agro-met advisory offerings in India.
The growth of weather based farmer extension services in India has however been uninspiring. A synergetic approach that assimilates knowledge from various sources and disseminates to farmers is the need of the hour.
Projects like Climate Change Knowledge Network in Indian Agriculture (CCKN-IA), where the Ministry of Agriculture is a key stakeholder, with similar objectives should become more broadbased.
The project covers only 22,000 farmers in the three states of Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Odisha. While the debate on farm subsidies reigns, the Ministry of Agriculture should also bring weather information under the ambit of subsidies. This will enable the millions of resource deficient small and marginal farmers to avail such services. Only then the savings to GDP would reach numbers envisaged by the minister.
The role of private initiatives like Reuters Market Light, ITC's e-choupal & TCS's mKrishi and NGOs like Pradan are commendable in vending extension services. Many mobile operators are also warming up to the opportunity of weather inputs as a value added service in their quiver of customer centric solutions. But weather forecasting capabilities are not native to any of these players.
An evolutionary step in enhancing the success of "timely weather forecasts" would be to unravel a government sponsored (subsidized) model of engaging private weather enterprise for weather forecast dissemination across geographies. Economic profit numbers apart, we will be doing our farmers a huge favour.
Columnist
Indranil is a weather industry expert with a decade long experience in the domain. He has been instrumental in setting up novel weather services across landscapes for both agriculture and industry, raising capital and crafting a growth story for weather forecasting in India. Currently he is Senior Vice President of Express Weather.
