In 60 yrs, 268 extreme rainfall events, more than 69k deaths
NEWDELHI:Extreme rainfall events have tripled since 1950 in central India and killed over 69,000 people across the country while leaving 17 million homeless, says a study by weather scientists.
The paper, by scientists in India, US and France, has been published by Nature Communications journal in its October issue. The states that witnessed the worst incidents of extreme rainfall events include Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana as well as parts of the Western Ghats — Goa, north Karnataka and south Kerala.
“There have been 268 reported flooding events in India over 19502015 affecting about 825 million people, leaving 17 million homeless, and killing 69,000 people (according to the International Disaster Data Base),” it said.
According to lead author Roxy Mathew Koll, a scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, a premium research body under the ministry of earth science (MoES), extreme rainfall is defined as more than 15cm of rain in a day and “spread over a large region, enough to cause floods”. “These widespread extremes were two per year in central India during 1950s. Now, it’s six per year,” Koll said.
M Rajeevan, MoES secretary, Subimal Ghosh and his team at IIT Bombay, Raghu Murtugudde of the University of Maryland, and Pascal Terray, Sorbonne University, Paris, are co-authors of the paper. Rajeevan attributed global warming and its impact as a major reason for the erratic and extreme weather pattern.
The combined population in central India is more than the total population of the US put together. The fact that this intensification is against the background of a declining monsoon rainfall, which has been observed in previous studies, makes it catastrophic, as it puts several millions of lives, property and agriculture at risk, experts say.
The paper said floods alone lead to losses of around ~20,000 crore in India, 10% of global economic losses. “The plains of central India are largely floodprone,” said Koll.