Verification of a Rational Combination Approach for Agricultural Drought Assessment: A Case Study Over Indo-Gangetic Plains in India

Agricultural Drought is characterized by a deficient supply of moisture, resulting either from sub-normal rainfall, erratic rainfall distribution, or higher water with respect to a crop. In spite of technological developments in providing improved crop varieties and better management practices, in India, agriculture has been considered a gamble due to higher spatial and temporal variability. The Rice-Wheat (RW) system is the major cropping system of the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) in India and occupies 10 million hectares. In this paper, the authors have examined the possibility of rationally combining the rainfall anomaly index, a weather based index and an agriculture index based on the Crop Growth Simulation Model for a rice-wheat productivity assessment in selected sites of IGP in India. The district average yields of rice varied from 0.9 t/ha at Samastipur to 3.8 t/ha at Ludhiana. Rice yields decreased from the west to east IGP, and farmers in the western IGP harvested more rice-wheat than those in the eastern regions. The productivity gap showed that all the sites were produced only 50% of the potential in RW system productivity during the triennium ending period 2005. This paper may help researchers and planners to take appropriate measures for improving productivity.