And what that tells us about how agriculture is faring in Punjab.
The professor will not forget 2015 easily.
A scientist at Ludhiana’s Punjab Agriculture University, he has been studying cotton for 15 years. But what he saw this year was entirely unfamiliar.
It started with the rains. Punjab saw downpours during the normally dry months of March and April. It rained in June as well – a month when temperatures should have touched 47 degrees, with hot summer winds (the famous loo) gusting across the state.
Instead, the temperature stayed below 40 degrees on most days that month. On the days it did rise, said the scientist, who spoke to Scroll on the condition of anonymity, it did not cross 43 degrees.
More climatic strangeness followed. It barely rained in the traditional monsoon months of July and August. The first three weeks of September stayed dry as well, followed by heavy rains towards the end of the month.
The aberrant weather patterns catalysed a boom in whitefly – an insect that sucks sap from plants during its nymphal stage. And this triggered, among other things, a political crisis in Punjab.
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