The monsoon is expected a week earlier this year. The newspapers and the tv channels did cover that. What they have not covered is why delhi has started getting rains during summer. I came to delhi in 2007, summers. The summer then was the real deal, hot, with ‘loo‘ blowing in the daytime. Riding a bike, I could feel my beard twirling in the hot wind. Then 2008 came, and the summers were different. It would get hot, for 4-5 days, then we would get a shower. That cooled the area down for 2-3 days. And so it went in circles. It is the same this year. And when I searched, I found out that the Tehri dam was finished and got operational in 2007. Co-incidence? I think not.
Of course the only data I have is the time the dam became operational and the time the summers stopped in Delhi. Another thing is nobody likes summers. So whenever it rains, I see a lot of headlines in papers which go as, ‘..relief from the heat..’ and pictures of people looking happy getting wet. If the situation was the opposite, of summer getting hotter, people would have definitely asked, why is it happening. But that’s just human psychology, nobody thinks of reasons when the going is good, only when things turn bad, do they ask, ‘why? why is it happening to me?’
And this is not an idea which originated in my mind. I have travelled a lot in this area, from Dehradun, Mussoorie, to Rishikesh and Haridwar. And the local people, the farmers etc, point these rains to the Tehri dam. Of all the people, the farmer sure knows when the weather chages. Because though he needs rains, if the timing of the rains is wrong his crop may well get spoilt. And from a very top level view, it does make sense. If a very big water source just appears in an area, and gets heated up, it sure will evaporate and create a lot of local humidity. And that may cause rain. And it is a documented fact elsewhere in the world, like here in china’s three gorges dam. Now I am just using common sense here. If any one who reads this has any specific information about anything related, I would like to know. We may all know about global warming, and its consequences, but we should first know about the local climate changes. And whether these local climate changes, are due to our own actions.
