India extreme rainfall corridor (GS Paper 1, Geography)
Context:
- The Indian monsoon has well-known features, such as the onset of the monsoon, the withdrawal, the active and break periods, and the low-pressure systems (or monsoon depressions).
- Every aspect of the monsoon has been affected by global warming.
Details:
- The total seasonal rainfall has also trended downwards for more than seven decades, due to the differential heating of the land versus the ocean due to global warming.
- However, this trend has been distributed unevenly through the monsoon season, as manifest in the longer duration but lower intensity of dry spells and the greater intensity of wet spells.
- While the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has made progress in forecasting extremes, multiple factors can combine to still produce devastating heavy rain events that remain hard to anticipate.
Where does extreme rain occur?
- India’s monsoon forecasts rely heavily on its relation to the El Niño and the La Niña phenomena, although this relation holds only about 60% of the time.
- Researchers are also continuing to search for additional process understanding, especially for high-impact extreme rainfall events.
- A new study has found that despite all these seemingly disparate changes in different aspects of the monsoon dynamics, a remarkable stationary element exists in terms of where the synchronised extreme rainfall events occur.
- The so-called large-scale extreme rainfall events are actually simultaneous or near-simultaneous heavy rain episodes that are strewn across a ‘highway’ that extends from parts of West Bengal and Odisha to parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan.
- The most remarkable new finding is that this corridor has remained unchanged from 1901 to 2019.
- In the seemingly chaotic change in all aspects of the monsoon, such a trapping of the extreme events to a relatively narrow corridor is good news for potential improvements in process understanding, which is bound to lead to better predictions of these sychronised extreme rainfall events.
What does this mean for the monsoon’s stability?
- Traditional statistical methods tend to miss the complex relations between multiple nodes of rainfall centres.
- Rainfall data from the IMD at a 25-km scale in latitude and longitude offers a rich field over which sophisticated network analysis can be applied to extract the nodes that have highest synchronicity in rainfall with other nodes near and far.
- This analysis found that the most active nodes have followed this ‘highway’ for more than a century. The link lengths between nodes, or the scales of synchronicity, have remained nearly constant, at an average value of about 200 km.
Popcorn and kettle analogy:
- Central India is the kettle that warms up from the pre-monsoon into the monsoon. The monsoon rainfall systems are like kernels of corn popping randomly across the kettle.
- But it turns out that the kernels are popping in a synchronous dance, in an indication that large groups of popcorn are jumping up at the same time.
- An analysis of winds and other circulation features indicate that the monsoon domain has been unique in remaining fairly stable for the formation of these extremes despite the various kicks from all tropical oceans and from pole-to-pole.
What do the findings mean for forecasts?
- Some researchers have said that stationary elements no longer exist in climate systems because of global warming. Yet the Indian monsoon continues to produce surprises in the way it is able to synchronise heavy rain events as well as stick to the ‘highway’ for such a long time.
- This is also the corridor for the monsoon depressions, which themselves have shown an increase at the 3- to 10-day timescales while decreasing at lower frequencies of 10-60 days. These changes are manifest in the active and break periods.
- The main candidate for the geographic trapping of synchronised extreme rainfall is likely to be the range of mountains running along the west coast and across Central India.
- This hypothesis needs to be tested in models, but its implications for improving forecasts of such events is undeniable.
- The finding also suggests that, in order to improve forecasts, increasing the model resolution and the computational cost may not be necessary. Instead, the focus can be on the dynamics of synchronisation.
- The potential for reducing risk at the smaller scale from these large-scale extreme rainfall events, for agriculture, water, energy, transportation, health, etc., is also alluring.
- Fortunately, India is in a solid position vis-à-vis its modelling capacity and computational resources to fully exploit this potential.
74 percent Indians could not afford healthy diet in 2021, report
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Why in news?
- Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a report, titled, “Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023: Statistics and Trends”.
- The FAO report is a glimpse of the progress in meeting Sustainable Development Goals and World Health Assembly (WHA) global nutrition targets.
- It said that during the pandemic and the “5Fs” crisis – food, feed, fuel, fertilizer, and finance – the Asia Pacific region witnessed harrowing statistics.
Details:
- The total seasonal rainfall has also trended downwards for more than seven decades, due to the differential heating of the land versus the ocean due to global warming.
- However, this trend has been distributed unevenly through the monsoon season, as manifest in the longer duration but lower intensity of dry spells and the greater intensity of wet spells.
- While the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has made progress in forecasting extremes, multiple factors can combine to still produce devastating heavy rain events that remain hard to anticipate.
Where does extreme rain occur?
- India’s monsoon forecasts rely heavily on its relation to the El Niño and the La Niña phenomena, although this relation holds only about 60% of the time.
- Researchers are also continuing to search for additional process understanding, especially for high-impact extreme rainfall events.
- A new study has found that despite all these seemingly disparate changes in different aspects of the monsoon dynamics, a remarkable stationary element exists in terms of where the synchronised extreme rainfall events occur.
- The so-called large-scale extreme rainfall events are actually simultaneous or near-simultaneous heavy rain episodes that are strewn across a ‘highway’ that extends from parts of West Bengal and Odisha to parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan.
- The most remarkable new finding is that this corridor has remained unchanged from 1901 to 2019.
- In the seemingly chaotic change in all aspects of the monsoon, such a trapping of the extreme events to a relatively narrow corridor is good news for potential improvements in process understanding, which is bound to lead to better predictions of these sychronised extreme rainfall events.
What does this mean for the monsoon’s stability?
- Traditional statistical methods tend to miss the complex relations between multiple nodes of rainfall centres.
- Rainfall data from the IMD at a 25-km scale in latitude and longitude offers a rich field over which sophisticated network analysis can be applied to extract the nodes that have highest synchronicity in rainfall with other nodes near and far.
- This analysis found that the most active nodes have followed this ‘highway’ for more than a century. The link lengths between nodes, or the scales of synchronicity, have remained nearly constant, at an average value of about 200 km.
Popcorn and kettle analogy:
- Central India is the kettle that warms up from the pre-monsoon into the monsoon. The monsoon rainfall systems are like kernels of corn popping randomly across the kettle.
- But it turns out that the kernels are popping in a synchronous dance, in an indication that large groups of popcorn are jumping up at the same time.
- An analysis of winds and other circulation features indicate that the monsoon domain has been unique in remaining fairly stable for the formation of these extremes despite the various kicks from all tropical oceans and from pole-to-pole.
What do the findings mean for forecasts?
- Some researchers have said that stationary elements no longer exist in climate systems because of global warming. Yet the Indian monsoon continues to produce surprises in the way it is able to synchronise heavy rain events as well as stick to the ‘highway’ for such a long time.
- This is also the corridor for the monsoon depressions, which themselves have shown an increase at the 3- to 10-day timescales while decreasing at lower frequencies of 10-60 days. These changes are manifest in the active and break periods.
- The main candidate for the geographic trapping of synchronised extreme rainfall is likely to be the range of mountains running along the west coast and across Central India.
- This hypothesis needs to be tested in models, but its implications for improving forecasts of such events is undeniable.
- The finding also suggests that, in order to improve forecasts, increasing the model resolution and the computational cost may not be necessary. Instead, the focus can be on the dynamics of synchronisation.
- The potential for reducing risk at the smaller scale from these large-scale extreme rainfall events, for agriculture, water, energy, transportation, health, etc., is also alluring.
- Fortunately, India is in a solid position vis-à-vis its modelling capacity and computational resources to fully exploit this potential.
74 percent Indians could not afford healthy diet in 2021, report
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Why in news?
- Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a report, titled, “Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023: Statistics and Trends”.
- The FAO report is a glimpse of the progress in meeting Sustainable Development Goals and World Health Assembly (WHA) global nutrition targets.
- It said that during the pandemic and the “5Fs” crisis – food, feed, fuel, fertilizer, and finance – the Asia Pacific region witnessed harrowing statistics.
DAY – NRLM:
- The Ministry is implementing Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY – NRLM) across the country (except Delhi & Chandigarh).
- The objective is to organizing the rural poor women into Self Help Groups (SHGs) and continuously nurturing and supporting them till they attain appreciable increase in incomes over a period of time and improve their quality of life and come out of abject poverty.
- The Mission has mobilized 9.89 crore women from rural households into 89.82 lakh SHGs as on 30th November, 2023.
Financial support:
- Under DAY-NRLM, SHGs and their federations are empowered by providing them funding support in the form of Revolving Fund (RF) and Community Investment Fund (CIF).
- In addition, the SHGs are also facilitated for Bank linkage for accessing credit at subsidized rates of interest.
- SHG member are taking loan from these funds for taking up various income generating activities.
Livelihoods activities:
- The Mission also helps SHG households for taking up livelihoods activities in rural area through various interventions through sub-schemes like Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP), Aajeevika Grameen Express Yojana (AGEY), Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP), Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDUGKY) & Rural Self Employment Training Institutes (RSETI).
Significance:
- DAY NRLM has played a significant role in transforming the lives of rural poor, especially women.
- It has contributed to increase in savings, reduction in share of informal loans, improved labour force participation of women, significant improvement in access to other social sector schemes and a significant improvement in households’ income sources.
Interventions are being taken made to address the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities in rural areas:
- All rural households with at least one deprivation, as identified by the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC-2011), form the target group of DAY-NRLM. In addition, households identified as poor through the process of Participatory Identification of the Poor (PIP) and duly validated by the Gram Sabha are also included as the DAY-NRLM target group.
- The Mission has special focus on early inclusion of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, persons with disability, elderly, poorest of the poor and other vulnerable sections of community into SHG fold under DAY-NRLM through participatory vulnerability assessment processes as part of social mobilization in the States/UTs.
- Provision of Vulnerability Reduction Fund (VRF) up-to Rs. 1,50,000 per Village Organization (VO). This is a corpus fund given to VO/Primary Level Federation at Village level to address vulnerabilities faced by the individuals or household(s) or communities.
- Special projects have been sanctioned for inclusion and comprehensive development of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) communities of Kerala, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh and for socio-economic development of Vantangiya and Banwariya marginalized communities in UP.
- The innovative approach towards skill development is establishment of RSETIs, the district-level Rural Self Employment Training Institutes managed by the Banks with active co-operation from the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India and State Government.
- These dedicated institutions ensure necessary skill training of the rural youth to mitigate the unemployment problem. The Lead Bank in the district takes responsibility for creating and managing the RSETI. At present, 591 RSETIs are functioning across 577 districts.
DDU-GKY:
- The Ministry is also implementing Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY), a placement-linked skill development program to build the capacity of rural poor youth of the age-group 15 to 35 years.
- This programme is being implemented since September 2014 to address the needs of domestic and global skill requirements. So far, 15,59,438 candidates have been trained under DDU-GKY.
