An investment of Rs 990 crore by India’s earth sciences ministry on research and supercomputing facilities for weather forecasting now yields annual benefits 14-fold higher through economic gains to farmers, fisherfolk and livestock owners, an economic think tank claimed on Tuesday.

The National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has, in an exercise to quantify gains from the country’s monsoon mission and an imported high-performance supercomputer, estimated the annual gains at Rs 13,300 crore for farmers and Rs 663 crore for fisherfolk.

The monsoon mission, a Rs 551 crore research effort from 2012 through 2019, and the Rs 439 crore HPC acquired in 2018 were aimed at improving weather and rain forecasts and advisories for farmers, livestock owners and fisherfolk.

The earth sciences ministry has said both initiatives have led to, among other outcomes, more reliable seasonal monsoon forecasts, short and medium range (8 to 10 days) forecasts of extreme weather events over very high resolution 12km grid zones.

“We see evidence for significant economic gains every year to poor farmers in rain-fed areas,” said Poonam Munjal, an economist and senior fellow at the NCAER. The gains come through advisories that allow them to take actions and avoid losses they would have otherwise suffered in the absence of reliable weather alerts.

The study, commissioned by the earth sciences ministry, found that 80 per cent of sampled farmers and 83 per cent of sampled livestock owners have reported “reduced losses” after improved weather advisories under the two initiatives.

It also found that the proportion of sampled fishermen who used advisories pointing out fishing zones increased from 15 per cent in 2015 to 87 per cent in 2019. Nine in 10 fishermen claimed the advisories helped them avoid “empty trips”, the report said.

The researchers based their estimates on a survey that questioned nearly 4,000 farmers and 1,376 livestock owners from 173 districts in 16 states and 757 fishermen from 34 districts in seven states.

“We’ve always known qualitatively that advisories help farmers and fishermen — this exercise provides numbers for those gains,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, secretary in the earth sciences ministry.

The study found that 98 per cent of farmers and 76 per cent of livestock owners who made modifications to at least one of their critical practices reported gains in incomes. The practices ranged from changing crop varieties, adjusting ploughing, harvesting or fertiliser application times, or changing animal breeds or modifying shed or shelters or fodder according to advisories they received.

The average annual income of farming households that adopted nine such modifications according to advisories received was Rs 3.02 lakh compared with Rs 2.43 lakh for households that changed one to four practices, and 1.98 lakh for households that did not change any practice.

The NCAER had in 2012 through a similar exercise estimated that the gains from satellite-guided fishing advisories at Rs 38,000 crore, amounting to nearly 10 years of India’s space budget.