World News Research Podcast - Sadie Voorhees & Claire Cho

This is a research project on the impact of monsoons and heavy rainfalls in southern India. Monsoons are crucial for India's agriculture, but climate change is making them more unpredictable. Droughts and floods caused by monsoons have devastating effects on the economy, especially for the poor population who rely on farming. The 2021 southern India floods resulted in landslides and the failure of a dam, causing loss of life and extensive damage. The government needs to be proactive in implementing drainage systems and better infrastructure to prevent such disasters. Despite challenges, the government has responded quickly to provide assistance, but more preparation is needed for future events. This is our research project on the monsoons and heavy rainfalls that are found in southern India. To start on background information on monsoons in southern India, they have a huge effect on India's agriculture because it makes up 70% of India's annual rainfall and that has a big effect on the crop yield. It's very important to their country because their agriculture and their farming is a major part of their economy and 15% of their economy employs 50% of the population so this is a huge big industry for the people of India and so this rainfall has a big impact on that. Not only that, climate change is making patterns even more unpredictable. These monsoons happen yearly so the people living in India know that they are coming but it's hard to know exactly when and how severe they will be. And because these monsoons are so unpredictable, it makes them even more severe when they do happen if it's either flood or drought and there's differences in each but either too much water or too little water can cause problems for the entire community and so they try to warn citizens about this but even when they try to warn them about severe weather things, it still can have devastating effects. Yeah, so for example droughts are more damaging to the economy than a flood is because no water has an extremely negative impact on the agriculture and this would force imports at higher prices because India is pretty self-sufficient but if they can't grow their own crops due to unreliable monsoons, then they would need to import resources from other places. And then on the other side of that, a flood usually is pretty beneficial to the region because this super flood, a lot of rain at once, is generally very beneficial to the landscape because it replenishes the reservoirs but at the same time you don't want too much of this rain water at once because it can lead to floods which is kind of what we saw in our event of the 2021 southern India floods that we'll go into later. Yeah, so when there's a lot of water, yes it's good in some ways but also it causes a lot of people to die. People die every single year from monsoons and it is just a big problem. The poor population is also heavily affected by this as they don't have as many resources as the others do to recover from a natural disaster like this. The poor population is also generally the demographic that are more farmers and agriculture workers and so they're the ones who live in these plains and live on these farms that are usually more greatly impacted by the monsoons when there is either a drought or a flood and it can change their whole livelihood. Yes, and it can affect their jobs too. Politically, Prime Minister Modi in his election recently promised how he would make an effort to double farmers' income but that can only happen if there is consistent rainfall from monsoons and that can cause issues politically because if he can't keep that promise because the monsoons are so unpredictable, that could be a real issue. Moving on to our more specific event on how these monsoons can lead to serious problems for people is in 2021 in the fall, southern India had major floods and this then led to landslides because of their super heavy monsoon this year that was not expected from the population. So earlier that year, the general rainfall was pretty normal. It lasted from around June to September and nothing seemed out of the ordinary but then after their usual season in around November, exactly November 11, 2021, there was a storm that formed over the Bay of Bengal and it made landfall in the Tamil Nadu state and this was very unexpected for citizens because they believed that their rain season had been over for their crops. This was a very large flood and not only did it bring rain, it was floods and landslides which was devastating for the people living in India. 41 people died from this one monsoon and this is according to the Indian National Emergency Response Center. There were so, so many effects from this. For the safety of people, thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes. Thousands of people were evacuated with their protocols and many of the alerts that were sent by the government for these people to evacuate are known as red alerts and orange alerts and these were basically sent out to the people, notifying them of the severe weather and then they would, depending on how severe it was, they would then evacuate people after that. But then after they would evacuate people with this mass flooding, they also had to then solve the problem and in order to do this, they had to spend a lot more money on repairing things and then they also had to shut down many things in their countries like railroads and they also had to spend more money on distributing pumps to drain the water so overall, even after the flood, it was also just a very expensive natural disaster to fix. Yeah, and while they made efforts after the flood to try and fix things, during it, a dam in Andhra Pradesh failed because there was not enough money to build and maintain the dams and so there was a lack of water control which only made the flood worse and this just goes to show how the government should have prepared better, not just reacting after it happened. Yeah, and then also in that other state where the dam failed, that wasn't even in the main state where the storm hit, this was another state nearby which shows that even if the impact isn't directly over one state, it can also impact the whole area around it especially with poor infrastructure that even at the slightest small flood that might have reached into that area could also have the same number of damages because of the poor infrastructure that was set in place for these types of disasters and just kind of the overall unpreparedness in advance for these types of events. Yeah, it is just crazy how monsoons come every year but still they have such a devastating effect on the people of India and also that Indians need monsoons to survive but still they have such negative effects on the economy and they injure and kill people every single year. Yeah, I think it's also just a very interesting concept that in a country, because this isn't really as popular or like it doesn't happen as often in the United States where we rely on like one super heavy rainfall for like all of our crops and so in this very like different region where this is like super important, it's crazy how inconsistent that can be and how like much of an effect this can have on their economy especially with their agriculture so it's just an interesting thing to think about. Also, the government really does need to be more proactive. For example, implementing more drainage systems prior to these natural disasters would be extremely beneficial so that they are prepared for when they come because they do know that they are coming and also to set up a system for people who are losing their homes since they are forcing evacuations from their houses, they do need somewhere to go. Yeah, so even though in this 2021 instance the government reacted fairly quickly and they gave responses that were pretty fast and to help their people, I think moving forward there needs to be more preparedness for that like I already mentioned just like building more infrastructure, having better dams, like having better systems in place for when these things do happen because the monsoons are so inconsistent, you need to have these types of things in place just so that you can make sure to keep as many people safe as possible and prevent as much damage. Yes, and people also go missing every year and a big part of that is that many roads that are flooded or slid from land stop access to people who are stuck and that's really in their homes or in other places, so it would really be beneficial to have better roads in preparation for these landslides so that they can access people who are not able to be easily accessible for rescue. I think that is really, really important is a big part of people's safety. Yeah, and overall I think that the government handled it in the best way that they could especially because these disasters cause a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear for the people and dealing with them on such a massive scale, especially because India's population is so large, especially in the southern part because that's the more urbanized part of India, so just these more like packed in groups of people and like big farms and big economy like infrastructures and all of this that are being destroyed by these, there definitely needs to be a little bit like more preparation because they're so inconsistent each year, but I think that overall natural disasters are going to happen all over the world and there's nothing that people can really do to stop that, and so I just think everyone needs to do the best they can to like prevent damages for everyone else. Yeah, India is doing all that they can year after year and I'm sure that from here things will only improve, there will be better systems implemented and that the government will be able to handle it better. Yeah, so overall if future natural disasters happen relating to the monsoons in India, I do believe that they will be more prepared.