Mayank Bhardwaj in Reuters: India's farm economy could contract this fiscal year for the first time in over a decade because of drought, threatening Prime Minister Narendra Modi's drive to lift millions in the countryside out of poverty and bolster his party's support.Roughly half of India's farmland lacks irrigation and relies on monsoon rain, but this year's rainfall is officially forecast to be only 88 percent of the long-term average and, for the first time in nearly three decades, farmers face a second straight year of drought or drought-like conditions.
That comes on top of a crash in commodity prices, unseasonable rain earlier this year and delayed sowing late last year because of scanty monsoon rain.
"Farmers are already reeling under heavy losses ... and now they don't have money to irrigate their fields or use an optimum level of inputs like fertiliser," said Ashok Gulati, an agricultural economist who formerly advised the government on crop support prices...
A 2012 drought in Karnataka, shot by Pushkarv, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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