A week of sporadic rain and hailstorms across Maharashtra has damaged 40,000 hectares of farm land in the state. This is the third consecutive year that unseasonal weather has caused havoc for Maharashtra’s agriculture.

The hailstorms, triggered by a trough carrying moisture from the Bay of Bengal to the Konkan, entered the state on February 27 in Yavatmal, before shifting south and west to cover most of Maharashtra.

“Over the next 24 hours, there might be thunder squalls in Vidarbha, Marathwada and Madhya Maharashtra,” said N Chattopadhyay, Deputy Director General of Meteorology (Agrimet) at the India Meteorological Department in Pune. “We expect that Maharashtra will be clear from March 6 onwards.”

The belt is now likely to shift north, where states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir are likely to be affected. For now, Maharashtra has had a narrow escape, Chattopadhyay said.

“If this had happened 15 days back, there would have been much more damage because most harvesting has finished by now,” he said. “Another advantage this year is that the storms have not spread widely. This is happening in isolated places for a short period of time.”

Agriculture affected

This round of hailstorms, though relatively weak, follows four years of poor monsoons and three of unseasonal rain at this time of the year. In the Lok Sabha on Friday Union minister of agriculture Radha Mohan Singh said that there had been 3,228 farmer suicides in 2015, the highest recorded in 15 years. Further rain could compound this distress.

The state has asked revenue officials in affected districts to assess the damage, so it is not yet clear what the scale of damage is. Farmers’ rights activist Kishor Tiwari said that it was possible that around 20,000 farmers might be affected.

“The government should implement disaster relief norms for this immediately,” he said. “Right now, they are still gathering information. We are just glad that this is not as bad as 2014.”

Tiwari, who heads a state task force to study the state’s agricultural crisis, said that the government had begun to implement certain schemes to ease rural distress.

“The government might be good, but with corrupt officials, nothing can happen,” he said.

That sinking feeling

This is the fourth consecutive year that unseasonal hailstorms have devastated the state. The situation is not as bad as in 2014, when unexpected hailstorms and rain in February and March devastated crops in 28 of the state’s 34 districts. What seemed like a single year’s anomaly then was repeated in 2015 and now 2016, even if at decreasing strength.

To get a sense of how unusual heavy rain in March in these parts of Maharashtra was, the South Asian Network for Dams, Rivers and People in 2014 examined rainfall data for March between 1905 and 2002. One block of Solapur district, they found, got 771.79% more rain in one day than the highest monthly rainfall the district had ever recorded, which was in 1915.

Chattopadhyay says that it is too soon to pin down a cause for these hailstorms.

“This may or may not be due to climate change,” he said. “The last 15 years there has been a lot of climate change-related variability, with droughts in Marathwada and hot winds in Punjab. The last three years continuous there have been hailstorms in Maharashtra. It is a fact and it is under study now. We are still trying to understand its cause.”