The recent severe flooding in India has displaced millions of people, killed hundred, and seem to be a sinister portent of worse to come, in a country that already has a full plate of problems. Time Magazine, of course, tells us it’s due to climate change. How far that is true or not, I don’t know, but it’s also clear that government inefficiency (there is no systematic method of water storage), the destruction of small-scale farming leading to soil erosion, practices of deforestation by developers and nomadic herdsmen, have contributed a lot. However, I suspect there’s more to the story than meets the eye. When something shows up on a Time magazine cover in this way, whatever the merits of the issue, it’s usually been harnessed into state propaganda. Tell-tale signs of that may be the fact that the climate change expert quoted is a government outfit (IPCC), not an academic one, and that the ubiquitous Peterson Institute is also in the picture. Also connected to the Peterson Institute is Nandan Nilekani, ex-CEO of Infosys (India’s Microsoft), now the head of the Indian government effort to create a biometric ID (about which I blogged here).

More digging warranted….

From Time Magazine:

“Although flooding has recently become commonplace in India – in 2008, over 3 million people were displaced when the Kosi river in Bihar burst its banks – but this year’s deluge came as a shock because if followed a protracted drought, and a monsoon season branded a dud by the authorities. To experts who’ve tracked the effects of climate change, however, the flooding came as no surprise. In its fourth assessment report in 2007, the Inter- Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that more extreme droughts, floods, and storms, would become commonplace in the future, and that these intense weather conditions would follow in close succession to each other, often in the same areas. ….Meager monsoons mean meager crops, and meager income, for Indian farmers. This year alone, the loss to crop yields and property in the two states has totaled almost $7 million. Dr. William Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics says that of all the potential damage that could occur from climate change, damage to agriculture is likely to be the most devastating. “In the southern parts of India, damage will be substantial and similar to that in other countries also located close to the equator,” he says. “In these locations, where temperatures are already at high levels, an increase in temperature will surpass crop tolerance levels.”
Already, food shortages have become a major concern for the government, as the retail prices of vegetables shoot up. Damage to the onion crop in the recent floods, for example, saw the vegetable’s price double within days.”

– More at Time Magazine.