CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 84 of 120

Correct — D, Kutch region. Drought planning targets the parts of the country where rainfall is both low and unreliable, and Kutch is the driest inhabited tract in India outside the Thar. Under the Koeppen scheme used in the school geography, north-western Gujarat falls in the semi-arid steppe type BShw, sitting immediately alongside the hot desert type of extreme western Rajasthan; annual rainfall is small, it falls in a few weeks, and the year-to-year variability is high, which is what turns low rainfall into recurrent drought. Add saline soils and the salt flats of the Great and Little Rann, and Kutch is exactly the terrain that drought-prone area programmes were designed for. None of the other three regions is arid.

• (a)Coastal Andhra Pradesh — Coastal Andhra Pradesh is a humid deltaic tract watered by the south-west monsoon and again by cyclonic depressions in the retreating monsoon; its recurrent hazard is cyclone and flood, not drought.
• (b)Ganga plains — The Ganga plains are the country's best-watered agricultural belt, with the monsoon reinforced by canal and tube-well irrigation. Dry spells occur, but the plains are not the target of drought-prone area planning.
• (c)North-eastern region — The north-eastern region includes the wettest places on earth. Mawsynram on the Khasi hills records the highest average annual rainfall anywhere, which places the region at the opposite end of the scale.

Drought in India is classified by cause — meteorological drought when rainfall falls well short of normal, hydrological drought when surface and groundwater storage is depleted, and agricultural drought when soil moisture cannot sustain the crop. The areas most exposed are those where mean rainfall is low and its variability high: western Rajasthan and Kutch, the interior Deccan in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, and parts of the Karnataka plateau and Telangana. Government programmes aimed at these tracts work through watershed treatment, soil and moisture conservation, and drought-resistant cropping rather than through relief alone.

The question is a straightforward test of the aridity map, and the way to answer it is to place each option on the rainfall gradient rather than to reason about relief measures. Two of the wrong options are among the wettest parts of India, which makes them easy to eliminate; the Ganga plains are the only one requiring a second thought, and irrigation is what settles it. A useful associated rule to carry forward is the irrigation criterion used in drought-prone area planning: an area with a sufficiently large share of its gross cropped area under irrigation is taken out of the drought-prone category altogether, because assured water breaks the link between a failed monsoon and a failed crop.

• North-western Gujarat, including Kutch, falls in the semi-arid steppe climatic type, adjoining the hot desert type of extreme western Rajasthan.
• Drought risk depends on the variability of rainfall as much as on its total.
• Drought is classified as meteorological, hydrological or agricultural according to what is deficient.
• The chronically drought-prone tracts of India are western Rajasthan and Kutch, the interior Deccan rain shadow, and parts of the Karnataka plateau and Telangana.
• Coastal Andhra Pradesh and the north-eastern region are among the country's wetter areas, the latter including Mawsynram, the wettest place on record.

• Equating drought with heat rather than with the shortfall and variability of rainfall.
• Assuming a region that suffers floods cannot also suffer drought, and the reverse.
• Overlooking irrigation cover, which can take an otherwise dry area out of the drought-prone category.

As a which-region-is-drought-prone identification, as a criterion question on drought-prone area classification, or as a climate-type match.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following best describes agricultural drought?

  • (a)Rainfall well below the long-period average
  • (b)Depletion of surface and groundwater storage
  • (c)Soil moisture insufficient to sustain the standing crop
  • (d)Failure of the monsoon to arrive on its normal date

  Answer(c) Soil moisture insufficient to sustain the standing crop — the moisture in the root zone, not the rain gauge, is what defines it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs of regions is chronically drought-prone in India?

  • (a)Coastal Odisha and the Brahmaputra valley
  • (b)Western Rajasthan and the interior Deccan rain shadow
  • (c)The Konkan coast and the Terai
  • (d)The Chhotanagpur plateau and the Sundarbans

  Answer(b) — low mean rainfall in the west and the Western Ghats rain shadow in the Deccan produce the same recurring shortfall.