The rainfall in the last few days has certainly brought relief to the agriculture sector but it may not be enough to tide over the crisis altogether. It has however, come in handy for the government to negate any demand for declaring drought in the district as the weather and crop conditions do not satisfy necessary parameters required for the purpose.

The Agriculture Department has even warned that rabi sowing may become impossible if the season ends in rainfall being on the high deficit side. Thrice last week almost all streams ran full owing to the spells of heavy rainfall, yet no irrigation project has received enthusing quantum of inflows.

Among the parameters required for declaring drought in any given area, the basic ones are those related with quantum of deficit in rainfall during the monsoon period, the quantum of decrease in area cultivated, the quantum of loss in productivity and the span of dry spells. “The dry spells should be of 21 days and above, rainfall deficit should be about 75 per cent, reduction in sown area should be by over 50 per cent as also the loss in productivity for a given district to be declared as drought hit,” explains Adilabad Assistant Director of Agriculture, Asuri Ravinder.

“The current spells of rainfall may have brought down the deficit considerably but not many farmers will benefit from it. Much of the crop, be it cotton, soyabean or redgram are likely to give poor results yield wise owing to the moisture stress suffered early in the season,” opines farmer leader B. Goverdhan Reddy of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti as he argues in favour of the government declaring drought this year to bail out farmers from their woeful state.

The overall deficit will be taken into account only at the end of September when the monsoon ends. It must be mentioned here that the district had no dry spells spanning 21 days as a day is considered to be dry if the rainfall is below 2.5 mm. Though many crops have lost much area the cumulative percentage for cultivated area is about 92 per cent which is comparatively good.

Source - http://www.thehindu.com/