Drought monitoring using different indices in four districts of Maharashtra
Student name: Ms Anuja Negi
Guide: Dr Anu Rani Sharma
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: Watershed Organization Trust, Ahmednagar
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Ms Chhaya Nikrad
Abstract: Maharashtra is characterized by its hot and dry climatic conditions and severely suffers from drought. Drought is highly destructive natural phenomena that affect the lives of the people in many ways. Worst affected are the farmers and their familie. Farmers commit suicide to escape the misfortune. Government of Maharashtra declared drought in 11 districts namely, Pune, Satara, Sangli, Solapur, Nashik, Ahmadnagar, Beed, Latur, Aurangabad and Dharashiv (Anna Patil, 2012). In this study four districts of Maharashtra viz., Ahmadnagar, Aurangabad, Beed and Jalna are studied for drought monitoring. Aurangabad, Beed and Jalna comes under Marathwada region and Ahmadnagar is in Nashik region. Drought is a complex natural disaster which is very different from other natural hazards. Drought is not a one day’s event but a prolonged process of water stress in the region. Effect of drought touches various aspects of society which includes environmental, social, and economical. Drought can be of various types viz., agricultural drought, meteorological drought, hydrological drought and socio-economical drought. Depending upon the types of drought, different drought indices are formulated to monitor drought in that region. In this study, to monitor agricultural, meteorological and hydrological drought, Vegetative Condition Index (VCI), Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Water level Index (SWI), are used, respectively. These indices generated maps indicated respective drought prone zones in the area. Agricultural drought is predominant in north eastern part of the region in 2000, which is the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. This region is known as one of the worst drought hit regions in Maharashtra. According to VCI maps, the agricultural drought continues to spread over entire region upto 2012, due to irregular and lower rainfall. SWI maps show irregular random drought areas due to disparity in rainfall, thus cannot delineate a particular region which can be marked as drought prone zone. According to SWI maps, hydrological drought shifts from eastern region of Marathwada to western parts of Nashik region, with persistent extreme drought in some places in the eastern part. This may be due to over exploitation of groundwater or lack of rainfall. Correlation among agricultural, meteorological and hydrological drought indices show good visual correlation but quantitatively there is no linear correlation among them. This is because these drought indices indicate different droughts of same region at same period.
KEYWORDS: Drought, VCI, SWI, SPI, hydrological drought, agricultural drought, meteorological drought.
