NEW DELHI: “We may escape coronavirus but not the impact of the other disaster (unseasonal rains and hailstorms) which struck us last week,” said Subhash Chaudhary, who, like other farmers in the north, suffered heavy damage to standing crops on Saturday even as 31 districts of Uttar Pradesh faced the wrath of the weather this month.Unseasonal rains and hailstorms have, so far, affected rabi (winter sown) crops on over 4 lakh hectares of land in north India with UP the worst-hit till Saturday. Besides UP, a few districts of Punjab , Haryana and Rajasthan too have borne the impact.“State government will provide compensation only after crop loss estimation. Unfortunately, such an exercise takes a lot of time. Many farmers will have nothing to survive on till then,” Chaudhary, whose farmland lies in Jewar, told TOI.Though the exact extent of damage is still unclear with state governments yet to collate data, officials in the agriculture ministry said preliminary reports from the ground suggest losses of up to 90% for vegetables, 70% for mustard and up to 60% for wheat and potatoes in certain districts in north-west India.“State governments have been asked to send estimates of crop losses. A central team will visit these areas to cross check the extent of damage before initiating the compensation process to provide relief to farmers,” said an official.Muzaffarnagar, Mathura, Ghaziabad , Gautam Budh Nagar and Aligarh are among the 31 districts which faced heavy damage in western UP.“Elders say they had not seen such weather in ‘Chaitra’ (March) in their memories. It (heavy rains and hailstorms) created havoc not only for wheat, mustard and gram but also extensively damaged sugarcane and vegetables,” said farm expert, Sudhir Panwar, while referring to extent of damage in his village Bhainswal in Shamli, UP.Raj Singh Deswal of Dulhera village in Jhajjar district of Haryana said though his village escaped weather’s fury on Saturday, farmers in other districts of the state and Alwar in Rajasthan suffered extensive damage to wheat, mustard and potato.The India Meteorological Department (IMD), meanwhile, predicted “scattered to fairly widespread rainfall” in Odisha, West Bengal, Sikkim and Jharkhand during March 18-20 and in Chhattisgarh, east Madhya Pradesh and Vidarbha (Maharashtra) during March 17-20 — it means unseasonal rains may affect rabi crops in those states as well over next four days.Though overall damage due to unseasonal rains and hailstorms, so far, is not as severe as was reported last in March 2015, farmers in certain pockets of outer Delhi, UP, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan say they are facing equivalent losses. Five years back, extreme weather events had damaged rabi crops in 15 states across the country. This crop year (July, 2019 - June, 2020), rabi crops were sown on over 625 lakh hectares of land across the country.