Indian Government To Invest In Supercomputer To Predict Monsoons

“I’ll cherish the day they’ll come up with a forecast for my state. It’s going to mitigate our risks and help us plan our crop better,” said Dharmendra Kumar, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh. 2015 saw close to 3,288 farmer suicides in drought-stricken Maharashtra, and after two consecutive years of irregular rainfall across the country, the Indian government is set to invest approximately Rs. 400 crore on a ‘supercomputer’ that, as per reports, will help in predicting monsoons, starting next year. With two-thirds of the 1.3 billion population relying on agriculture for their livelihood, such technology may just be the need of the hour.

With agriculture contributing to about 16 percent of our annual GDP, helping farmers yield healthier crops will also increase the revenue generated for the economy. Moreover, during the previous years, low production of crops has led to the inflation of prices in the market. 

Chief economist at Axis Bank adds, “The ability to predict one or two months prior to the sowing season is very important in agriculture, which inherently is very volatile in nature.”

Similar to what is currently being used in the United States, this technology will help in generating three dimensional models to help predict how the monsoon is likely to develop. This will inevitably replace the old-school statistical model, which currently assists in reporting weather forecasts, but has been much slower and even inefficient in predicting a forecast across all parts of the country due to the existing geographical and topographical differences.

“In the last one decade we’ve gained a greater degree of precision in forecasting rains, but monsoon still remains a very complex weather system, which only God has the ability to understand fully,” explains India’s Earth science secretary, M Rajeevan to Reuters. 

Will this expensive technology be able to change this and predict a reliable future for our farmers? We can only hope that the investment of such a large sum of money proves fruitful and farmers across the country get some relief, or at least a chance to prepare themselves for the rains, or lack thereof, to come.