A new drought monitoring tool gives hope of better preparation and mitigation at the farmer level

Subject: Geography

Context-

A new satellite-based drought-monitoring tool will be able to indicate the presence of drought and its level of severity, providing authorities with the maximum possible lead time to put mitigation strategies into place in India and across South Asia.

About the South Asia Drought Monitoring System (SADMS)-

In India, the South Asia Drought Monitoring System (SADMS) was developed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the country’s premier agricultural research institution.
It has been tested in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives, Afghanistan and Bhutan.
The system will not just monitor the drought conditions but also incorporate this information of real-time weather updates and open-access satellite data, and provide extension workers as well as agriculture and water resources authorities with all the information needed to forecast, monitor and manage drought on a weekly basis.
IWMI has been testing SADMS by validating it at the district level.
The input data comes into the platform from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
- This includes soil moisture, precipitation, temperature, wind speed and available cloud ratio. The scientists will also factor in historical droughts and their conditions.

How will it help the farmers-

It will help the farmers to decide which crops to grow.
During the drought seasons, they can choose to grow drought-tolerant crops like millet over water-intensive crops like rice.
The platform is already in operation in the state of Telangana.
From 2017, ICAR used SADMS to implement real-time contingency measures.
It helped farmers in three districts of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra to obtain drought-tolerant seeds, develop supplementary irrigation and apply potassium nitrate (which helps seedlings cope better with dry conditions).
As a result, crop yields for soybean increased by 7–8 quintals (700–800 kilograms) per 0.4 hectares, pigeon pea by 5–6 quintals per acre and cotton by 12 to 14 quintals per acre.

Drought conditions in India and South Asia region-

India featured as one of the severely drought-impacted countries in the United Nation’s latest drought assessment released May 11, 2022.
Nearly two-thirds of the country suffered drought during 2020-2022.
Severe droughts have reduced India’s gross domestic product by 2-5 per cent over the 20 years from 1998-2017.
Not only India, but the whole of South Asia also faced several droughts in recent decades and 50 major droughts have been reported since 1990, affecting over 750 million people with economic damages estimated at $7 billion.
There was previously no integrated end-to-end drought monitoring and management system available for South Asia.
The data from the drought-monitoring system is available at the grid level and can be visualised up to the taluk level.