Farm Raiders

Western India is facing its most fierce locust attack in nearly three decades, the origins of which lie outside the country and were triggered by weather events attributable to climate change

- Jitendra

ON DECEMBER 26 last year, Jugta Ram, a farmer in Barmer, Rajasthan, saw something that freaked him out. “There was a swarm of millions of locusts. It looked like a fast-moving rainy cloud and cast a shadow on a 10 km by 5 km landscape, completely eclipsing the winter sun,” he says. “We tried to scare them away by using traditional methods like making noise by banging empty metallic utensils and creating smoke, but these were ineffective.” The insects attacked his 12-hectare farmland in Tardo Ka Taal village which cost Ram his standing crop of cumin and castor—a loss of R4 lakh, he says. The entire village and a dozen others in the district lost all crops in a day.

What Ram saw was a swarm of the desert or yellow locusts (Schistocerca gregaria). He identifies the pest. “It is not the first time I had seen them,” he says, “but the swarm size was mind-boggling, not to mention the time of the attack.”

Yellow locusts from Pakistan raid Rajasthan and Gujarat every year. The insect has a lifespan of 90 days. It arrives in July, breeds, and the new generation leaves for Pakistan-Iran by October. The swarms chase greenery and raid regions that have just had monsoon because that is the best time to find food and breed. Usually, India faces less than 10 swarm attacks annually, but in 2019 there were over 200, says a scientist at the Union government’s Locust Watch Centre (IWC) in Jodhpur, requesting anonymity. There is no official declaration on the number of attacks so far. Apart from the spike in the number of attacks, the size of the swarms was more than twice the usual, say eyewitnesses.