If the drought, which now threatens to be one of the worst in recent memory, has left you depressed, do this on this Independence Day weekend. Just drive out of Delhi and go as far as you want, up north. Go to Shimla, Chandigarh, or as far as Amritsar, but drive, don’t fly. Because an incredible — and happy — surprise awaits you. Totally lush, bounteous fields of paddy stretch endlessly into the horizon on both sides of the highway. So where is the drought? Where are the caked, cracked and dried mud-flats with withered saplings that characterise drought? And mind you, Punjab and Haryana are among the worst hit states this year, notching up a rainfall deficit of 50 to 70 per cent in most places. What’s gone wrong, or right, here, you might ask?

You speak to the governments of the two states and they tell you how severe the drought actually is, how stressed their reservoirs are, how little rain has fallen this year. But then they also tell you with surprising confidence, even smugness, that “one drought we can manage, at a pinch even two in a row”. This drought, one of the severest ever for this region, will devastate farm economics to an extent, making the farmer spend more on diesel and power, but the yields — even in the water-guzzling paddy flats — are going to be more or less protected. In fact, Manpreet Badal, Punjab’s very modern and talented finance minister, and himself a farmer of no mean size, tells me the Punjabi farmer has been quick to recover from initial setbacks as the monsoon deteriorated unexpectedly. (This year’s monsoon forecasting has been probably the worst ever in our recent history, but that is a different story.) Because of poor forecasting, which kept on promising a monsoon recovery, many farmers missed the early paddy sowing window. But they more than made up for it by quickly switching to basmati which can be planted a little later. This will in fact mean more money for them — but a smaller contribution to the national paddy reserve.

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