Climate Change and Indian Agriculture

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interconnection between climate and economics. This paper attempts to the reason why instead of complimenting each other, economic progress becomes contrary to the climate. Countries are geographical entities or the regions separated by imaginary lines of borders on the surface of the earth. Along with the topography a region is made up of weather, climate, altitude, and latitude and soil structure making each one of them unique. Existence of a species is essentially a story of adaptations and interdependence through thousands of years of coexistence. This interdependence is not just limited in-between living things like plants and animals but interdependence in-between living things with non-living things like seasons, weather pattern, climate etc. Eons before we humans coined the term globalization, the weather or climate was globalised. Topographically, regions may be unique but they are interconnected through winds, clouds etc. The monsoons of south Asia is a case in point. India is often described as an agriculture country where agriculture practice is monsoon dependent. But ‘monsoon adaptive' is more appropriate than ‘monsoon-dependent' because we people of India adapted with our given weather and climatic conditions of our subcontinent. Nevertheless this relationship has been disrupted. In last few decades we have been repeatedly ‘guided' to rewrite the terms in-between us and our environment. We are ‘suggested' to switchover our agricultural practices from weather dependent to fossil fuel driven -energy dependent in order to make it more ‘efficient'. In this era growth has become the mantra of development.With the advent of industrial revolution economies becomes more and more fossil-fuel driven energy dependent. In this process we burn billions of gallons of oil spewing billions of tons of Carbon dioxide and other green house gases in our atmosphere year after year. This causes global warming which leads to change in climate and erratic weather patterns. Indian agriculture, is coping with a double whammy. In one hand due to the high dependency on fossil fuels the agriculture sector is slipping under the mountains of debt and on other hand it find itself on the receiving end of the human induced climate change in form of erratic weather patterns including monsoons.