Last fortnight, I wrote of an impending drought. 15 days on, I stand corrected. Now devastating floods are drowning parts of the recently parched country. So much so that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who last fortnight sought Rs 2,500 crore as drought relief, has now asked the Centre for flood relief, saying his state should be treated at par with flood-devastated Bihar.

But is this cycle of floods and droughts as natural as it looks? In 1986, the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi had asked my colleague Anil Agarwal the same question. He had scribbled a note to Anil asking him to explain how, "with environmental degradation, even low rainfall becomes a flash flood and the water rushes into the sea and then is not available as groundwater". He had wanted Anil to explain this vicious circle, as he had called it, to his parliamentary colleagues.

The question sounded simple enough. But the answers were tough. As we explored it became clear to us that the practice of "living with floods" was as challenging and urgent as that of "living with droughts".

Let me explain. By the mid-1980s it was clear that the annual flood-prone area