Climate Change

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IPCC releases its climate change report, alarms India of severe water shortage

Kalwaheri is a village of over thousand households comprising mostly of small farmers and landless people tucked away in Karnal, Haryana. The district, once the birth place of the Green Revolution, is now far from green.

Climate change poses a threat to all. Be it forests, water or agriculture- it affects everything. India's Northeast, particularly, has witnessed a great deal of this impact. Sikkim, the physical bridge between the Northeast and mainland India, is also bearing the brunt of climate change in a myriad ways with agriculture and water bearing the most pronounced repercussions.

Maharashtra reels under hail storms

Floods in Bihar have acquired menacing proportions following the embanking of its rivers, which has led to severe dislocations in the society. Estimates suggest that 70% of the population in north Bihar lives under the recurring threat of flood devastation (1). The 2013 floods affected more than 5.9 million people in 3768 villages (2).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report predicts large scale changes in temperature and precipitation over the Asian land mass. In the mountains, this translates to less snow, more intense but shorter episodes of rainfall and insufficient groundwater recharge, thereby resulting in the drying up of water sources.

Water is not ‘gender-neutral’, especially in India. It is the woman of the house who walks an average of 6 km each day to collect water for household use. In the Kumaon region, a newly married bride visits the family spring to fetch water a day after the wedding, in a symbolic tradition of water responsibility.

In Jhansi, Bundelkhand farmers experience great uncertainties in agriculture due to erratic rainfall. Covering 13 districts of southwest Uttar Pradesh and Northern Madhya Pradesh with a population of approximately 21 million, Bundelkhand is a typical semi-arid region.  Around 83% of the area is rural and more than one third of the households are considered to be below the poverty line.

Shifting cultivation, locally called 'Jhum', is a widely practiced system of crop cultivation among the indigenous communities of Northeast India. While it is generally contested as a destructive method of farming, it is also argued that the system lends itself as much more than just a farming practice.