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South Asia's dependence on the monsoon has always been a source of economic uncertainty. This paper examines the history of ways of thinking about the monsoon and risk, focusing on India. The science of meteorology, and a growing interest in ways to mitigate monsoon risk, developed in response to major famines. Piecemeal interventions, including a series of canals and small dams, began India's hydraulic transformation. By the middle of the twentieth century, massive hydraulic engineering emerged as the dominant solution to controlling the monsoon's risks. Large dams account for the largest share of government expenditure in independent India, but since the 1960s, intensive and mostly unregulated groundwater exploitation has played a greater role in meeting irrigation needs. The expansion in India's irrigated area and an expansion in food production. But this has come at a cost: millions have been displaced by dam construction; groundwater exploitation has reached unsustainable levels, and has had an effect on regional climate.

South Asia's agriculture is unique in its dependence on the monsoon. More than 70 % of total rainfall in South Asia occurs during just three months each year, between June and September: much of it falls during just a hundred hours of rain. 1 Around 60 % of Indian agriculture is rain-fed, and 60 % of India's population is employed in agriculture. A shift in the monsoon represents the gravest threat that climate change poses to lives and livelihoods in South Asia.

From the earliest times, the monsoon has been a source of economic uncertainty in India. In the nineteenth century the growing economic importance of India to the British Empire, the consequent intrusion of the colonial state into Indian agriculture, and the experience of devastating famines all put a premium on weather prediction. Agricultural officials and investors both sought to turn the uncertainty of the monsoon into calculable risk. It is no coincidence that meteorology and economic forecasting developed in tandem in colonial India. G.F. Wilson, financial member of the Viceroy's council, said in 1909 that BI recognise that estimating in this country is largely a gamble in rain."

Beginning in the 1940s, and building on colonial precedents, colossal hydraulic engineering emerged as the Indian solution to the unevenness of the monsoon. The construction of large dams dominated public expenditure in India after independence. Dams transformed the landscape and altered the water cycle with many unintended and unforeseen consequences. This infrastructural legacy perpetuates deeply-rooted ways of thinking about water, rainfall, and risk: emphasizing large-scale hydraulic engineering above all other approaches to mitigation. These continue to shape Indian responses to climate change. But despite extensive expenditure and despite their public prominence, dams have played a dwindling role in meeting India's irrigation needs since the 1970s. Facilitated by large power subsidies, India's farmers have turned to groundwater irrigation, producing what one expert has described as Ban atomistically managed water-scavenging irrigation regime involving tens of millions of pump owners" (Shah 2009). Many parts of South Asia have already crossed critical thresholds of freshwater availability, proposed by Rockstrom et al. (2009) as among the Bplanetary boundaries" that define a "safe operating space for humanity." The cumulative effect of Indian attempts to manage the peculiar uncertainties of the monsoon has been to deepen some forms of inequality in water availability and access to energy.