More than four thousand years ago, the Indus Valley Civilization faded into the sands of time. But for many years, we did not know the cause of its decline. In 2014, researchers from the University of Cambridge found the missing link between India’s past and the present – drought. Or more precisely, 200 years of it.

By studying the concentration of Oxygen levels in the shells of snails buried deep beneath layers of sediment, they found that the region had gone two centuries without a summer monsoon. Other studies correlated this to a likelihood that the Harappans changed their cultivation patterns. From wheat and barley to millets and rice, the ancients started fielding smaller patches of land. The steady decline of large cities soon followed.

And the Harappans were no more.

Today, India’s cities are larger than they have ever been. The subcontinent supports up to a fourth of the world’s population. But a steady and sure menace is poised to repeat history. Monsoons can fail for years at a time, but desertification is permanent. NASA’s Earth Observatory calls it the “permanent degradation of previously fertile land.”

In India, nearly a third of the Total Geographic Area (TGA) is being degraded every year, according to the country’s national space agency’s ‘Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of India‘. The data shows that 29.32 percent of TGA was undergoing land degradation in 2011-13, compared to 28.76 percent in 2003-05.



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