







































Ecology, Economy, and Society–the INSEE Journal 8(2): 1-4, July 2025 

EDITORIAL  

Indian Monsoon: A Clarion Call for a Systems 
Approach and Dialectical Thinking 

Sudha Vasan  

July, the middle of the main monsoon season in India, brings much-
anticipated rains that drench the heat of the summer.  The Indian monsoon 
is one of the oldest recorded weather phenomena, eagerly tracked and 
studied by researchers across the country. It directly affects the water 
availability and well-being of more than a billion people. Its origins and 
processes are still a matter of scientific debate, and the predictability of its 
strength, variability, and distribution is constantly evolving. It is a classic 
example of a complex and dynamic system, whose seasonal changes in wind 
direction cause more than two-thirds of all rain in South Asia. The 
differential heating of land and sea, the flow of moisture from the oceans, 
atmospheric pressure, and the subcontinent’s topography are only some of 
the factors affecting the monsoon. We now know that atmospheric 
phenomena occurring across the planet, such as the Intertropical 
Convergence Zone and El Niño Southern Oscillation, affect the monsoon 
as well. 

The monsoons are a time of celebration across India, denoting 
rejuvenation, fertility, and prosperity. During this time, floods inundate the 
riverbanks and deposit fertile silt, leading to bumper harvests that have 
sustained our agrarian civilization. It has inspired folklore, art, literature, and 
music. The monsoon’s beauty and joy are celebrated in classical literature 
such as Meghdoot, in folk art such as Warli, during festivals such as Teej and 
Onam, in Hindustani classical ragas such as Megh Malhar, and in popular 
cinema and music.  

 

 
 Professor, Department of  Sociology Delhi School of  Economics, University of  Delhi, 
Delhi 110007; svasan@sociology.du.ac.in    

Copyright © Vasan 2025. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 

NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v8i2.1769  

mailto:svasan@sociology.du.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v8i2.1769


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [2] 

However, the arrival of the monsoon in contemporary times also brings 
news of devastation and death. So far, the 2025 monsoon has been marked 
by an early onset, unusually rapid movement, abrupt halts, and localised 
disasters.  Intense rains have triggered landslides (a record 598 landslides 
have been reported in Mizoram alone), severed transport links across the 
Himalayan states, and washed away homes. Himachal Pradesh reported 85 
fatalities in one monsoon spell, according to the Himachal Pradesh Disaster 
Management Authority, with 54 of them directly caused by rain-related 
incidents such as landslides, flash floods, and cloudbursts, and the rest due 
to related road accidents.  How do we make sense of the much-awaited and 
celebrated monsoons becoming a period of disaster and despair? 

The twin crises of climate change and the limited imaginaries of 
development are shaping culturally embedded phenomena that define 
Indian weather. The influence of climate change on the monsoons is little 
understood, other than the experience of their unpredictability. The impact 
of specific developmental activities is less of a mystery. An already complex 
system of moisture-laden winds is now interacting with significant 
landscape changes, including heat islands, expanding urbanization, 
hollowed-out and blasted mountains, bare and exposed slopes, re-directed 
river flows, and encroached riverbeds, creating a recipe for disaster. A 
narrow developmental path follows the flows of capital, especially in the 
Himalayas. Four-lane highways tunnelling through the young mountain 
range obliterate the need to follow winding mountain curves, compressing 
time, ironing out local ecological features. Glacial rivers are short-circuited 
by the “development” of their more expansive floodplains, and their 
direction of flow is changed to produce hydropower in run-of-the-river 
projects. Riverbeds in dry seasons and years appear as prime flat land to 
accommodate an increasing population, the tourist influx, and an expanding 
economy. Long-settled rock structures and vegetation cover are disturbed, 
each event slowly chipping away at the stability of this complex, young 
mountain system, one blast at a time.   

Each change—four-lane roads, dams, diverted rivers, mining, tunnelling, 
and urban expansion—appears as a discrete event. In the best-case 
scenario, sustainable development has meant that each event is justified by a 
narrow cost–benefit analysis of its specific social and ecological impact 
within a limited lifecycle, and new plantations may or may not compensate 
for the loss of long-established biodiverse ground cover. This fragmented 
approach to sustainable development leaves us unprepared for heat pockets 
in the summer, floods and cloud bursts in the monsoon, and smog and 
poor urban air quality in the winter, until the retreating monsoon brings our 
attention back to urban floods in the southern states. Disaster management 



[3] Vasan 

 

follows each event, while the devastation to human and more-than-human 
life caused by our seasonal disasters never enters the financial and ethical 
assessments of our mega-development projects.  

The 2025 monsoon is yet another urgent call to rethink the cumulative and 
interactive impacts of our multiple development activities on dynamic 
planetary systems such as the Indian monsoon. A systems approach that 
can account for numerous and cumulative dynamic feedback loops, and 
dialectical thinking that can envision emergent processes from systemic 
contradictions, is essential for human survival. Such an approach has been a 
driver of ecological economics, which is also a humble effort of this journal 
that seeks to understand ecology, economy, and society as an integrated and 
dynamic system.  

Taking this interdisciplinary approach, our first research article in this issue 
(by R Mohan Raj, R Indhar Saidanyan, B Parthiban, and S Chandrasekaran) 
examines the ecological, social, and economic impact of the invasion of the 
Sailfin catfish in the Cauvery and Vaigai river basins in Tamil Nadu. An 
unanticipated consequence of keeping exotic fish as pets in aquaria is the 
loss in abundance of native comparator fish, which, in turn, results in 
economic loss and changes in occupation among fishing communities.  

In the second research article, Mohanasundari Thangavel and Nihal Singh 
Khangar engage with the balance of resource efficiency and environmental 
sustainability in rain-fed agriculture in Madhya Pradesh. Using lifecycle 
assessment to quantify the environmental impact of crop production, and 
the data envelopment analysis–directional distance function to evaluate 
efficiency, they report a 22% potential for improving eco-efficiency in rain-
fed food crop farming using government data from 2021–22. 

Charles Dwumfour Osei highlights the role of environmental literacy in 
shaping green agricultural production behaviour among vegetable farmers 
in Ghana in the third research article. In this emerging economy, the author 
shows that despite low environmental literacy, farmers are willing to 
practice sustainable agriculture. In our “Insights from the Field” section, 
Mugdha Khandelwal shares the positive gendered collateral impacts of solar 
photovoltaic pump (SVP) adoption in tribal districts in Chhattisgarh. By 
reducing the time and drudgery of water collection—which is typically a 
woman’s burden—SPVs have empowered women to rest and engage in 
other productive work. This has also reshaped the time-use patterns of both 
men and women.  

 



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [4] 

Two new books, Economics of Mineral Mining in India (S Mohammed Irshad, 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and the Oxford Handbook of Environmental and 
Natural Resources Law in India (Philippe Cullet, Lovleen Bhullar, and Sujith 
Koonan, 2024), are reviewed in this issue by Arpita Bisht and MK Ramesh, 
respectively. 

Last but not least, we carry a warm and glowing tribute to Prof U Shankar, 
one of India’s renowned economists, who was a pioneer in the field of 
environmental economics and a visionary institution builder who 
established the Madras School of Economics—written by his student and a 
senior economist in this field, G Mythili.   

  

 


