[Updated to add below new related links to stories about India and climate change]

First it was the killer drought, the worst since 1972, which pushed poverty-and-debt-stricken farmers to the ground and food prices up. Then came the floods, the worst in a 100 years, which claimed more than 200 lives and left over 2 million people homeless and hapless. The crisis this monsoon season -- critical to India's agricultural sector that accounts for a fifth of the country's GDP -- was backbreaking, exposing our lackluster agro sector that feeds an entire nation except those who toil for it; our dependency on weather patterns; our failure to manage millions affected by natural disasters; and the return of a recurring debate on climate change. First came the drought. The southwest monsoon that soaks the country June through September, relieving the summer-oppressed population and farmers alike, came early this year but delivered only about 77 percent of its long-term average. According to the Meteorological Department report, nearly 60 percent of the 500-odd met districts received deficient or scanty rainfall. While reports of mass suicides by debt-ridden farmers -- whose woes were exacerbated by the drought -- came in a steady trickle, the government kept assuring that we had enough food in storage and foreign exchange in the bank to tide us over any shortfall. We finally acknowledged that we were officially drought-ridden. The shortfall followed for sure: our sugar crop wilted,  production of staples like rice and legumes fell, and self-sufficient India geared up to import food to cover the shortage. But the monsoons were not done. On their way back, they deluged southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and parts of Maharashtra, damaged crops, left millions homeless, inundated villages, and claimed over 200 lives. It was the heaviest flood  the 800-mile-long Krishna river had seen in over 100 years. The Human Tragedy: Let's put aside the figures for a while. That nearly 60 percent of India's population depends on agriculture; that most farmers still depend on the seasonal rainfall to irrigate their fields; that we simply cannot manage disasters although we have lived with them for decades; that India's GDP pretty much remained untouched by the disastrous monsoon this year. It is the incredible human tragedy that is so painful and outrageous. The hands that feed us have to reach for the pesticide bottle to deliver them from their cycle of misery. Our robust GDP seems to have barely touched the majority of people who have made our country self-sufficient in food. Distressed villagers are migrating to cities to make ends meet. We have enough produce but our storage and distribution facilities are so poor ("Monkeys Feed on Foodgrain") that the people who need it most  cannot access it. The government doles out sops and banks cut rates on loans to affected farmers, but the help never reaches many, who find themselves indebted to ruthless moneylenders. In this moving story, a drought-hit farmer of the northern state of Bihar tells how he has started seeing sense in all the suicides ['I know now why farmers kill themselves' (via Ground Reality, via Global Voices Online)]:

"We used to wonder what it was. Now we know the pain. There is no bigger trauma than to see our land dry at this time of the year. I feel there is almost no point being alive."

In his blog Ground Reality, writer and food & trade policy analyst Devinder Sharma complains that for a very long time the media missed  the human tragedy and tried to figure out the drought by looking at GDP and trade numbers:

I got tired of answering questions about how much would be the fall in GDP from the impending drought. I know how difficult it was to draw the media to the bigger story (as they say in media parlance) of human suffering in the countryside. [...] That such a deadly drama continues to be enacted in the farms despite a number of committees and relief measures speaks volumes about the criminal apathy that prevails among the urban elite and the policy makers. The tragedy is that no one is keen to come to grips with the reasons that lead to this neverending saga of human suffering.

Film-maker and blogger Harini Calamur writes at her blog POV (via GlobalVoices) :

On the day Shahrukh Khan got detained for two hours — oh my god, how can someone stop SRK for two hours, hang them, quarter them; no quarter them, hang them — 21 farmers committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh because they couldn’t pay off their debt.

In her NDTV blog, Maya Sharma, who has been covering the floods in the southern state of Karnataka, says such natural disasters bring to light the way people suffer all through the year:

The people in our country are very adaptable. Sadly, they often need to be.[...] We saw a tiny fraction of those numbers when we were covering the flood. Dozens of people squashed together in relief centres - usually a school building that was built strong enough to withstand the rains. Many of them continuing to sleep outside their damaged houses - reporting to the nearest ganji kendra or relief centre at meal times. [...] And perhaps most disconcerting of all, hundreds of people living right on the road in makeshift tents surrounded by the possessions they were able to salvage. [...] No reliable source of clean drinking water, no toilets, no safe roof over their heads. This is not necessarily a post-deluge scenario. It is the way millions of Indians live  - come rain, come shine. It may take a natural disaster to bring into our focus the way the other 90 per cent live all the time - and for government and the rest of us to reach into our pockets and try to make things better...

Climate change and conservation: Any talk about erratic weather patterns inevitably sets off a debate about climate change, sustainable growth and water management. I am not a climate expert, but this discussion is gaining currency especially in the wake of the upcoming Copenhagen climate meet in December. Are the drought and floods harbingers of a disturbing change in weather cycles? Are they man-made disasters? One Time magazine story says just that:

Although flooding has recently become commonplace in India [...] but this year's deluge came as a shock because if followed a protracted drought, and a monsoon season branded a dud by the authorities. To experts who've tracked the effects of climate change, however, the flooding came as no surprise. In its fourth assessment report in 2007, the Inter- Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that more extreme droughts, floods, and storms, would become commonplace in the future, and that these intense weather conditions would follow in close succession to each other, often in the same areas.

Some have argued that it is poor irrigation, poor resources and water management that leads to droughts. On the other hand, India's water table may be in trouble, so harnessing more ground water will come at a price (When the rain fails: India's water crisis; The Economist). Newsweek's Sharon Begely has argued that although the developed world is primarily to blame for greenhouse gases, it is countries like India and China that will pay:

A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China. That is, they will suffer more from global warming than, for instance, Western Europe. In part, that reflects the fact that nature always batters the poor more than the rich, as Hurricane Katrina showed. [...]

But India and China are also in line to suffer disproportionately because of how climate change is affecting different geographic regions. [...] As patterns of rainfall shift to more deluges as well as more droughts due to the when-it-rains-it-pours phenomenon that global warming causes, both countries will also suffer more floods.[...]

The Indian monsoon is born from temperature differences between land and sea.[...] Some climate models show that as global warming heats land more than sea, the Indian monsoon will become more intense. More powerful monsoons are already causing tragic collateral damage, killing 2,200 people in India in 2004 and regularly displacing tens of thousands more. The Indian monsoon has also been striking earlier than its historical late-June arrival, threatening to put it out of sync with crop cycles.

That sounds reasonably close to what's happening. For a developing country like India, this comes as an incredible challenge: ensuring a growth that is sustainable. Which is why, as I had argued earlier here, a little bit of long-term selfishness will likely do India a great deal of good. India's economy needs to grow at a reasonable pace in order to pull out its masses from poverty. We need energy and water management so we can irrigate out fields and feed our population and farmers. But we also need a way to do this sustainably. I care less about international deadlines and targets. I'd rather see India and China develop their own climate policies to handle growth and sustainability.

Amidst much controversy about India's stand, the country recently signed a climate change deal with China. Results awaited.

More from the blogosphere:

"10 dollars can make a difference": Agelessbonding tells us how we can help flood victims 

Recent related news:

India goes indigenous on climate research -- Mint

A harvest of water -- National Geographic Magazine

Jairam Ramesh on India, climate change, Copenhagen -- Rediff.com