Met, set, go: Prior information on weather can prevent power grids from tripping; (below) Jatin Singh, founder of SkyMet

In Maharashtra’s Sanghli district, grape grower Bandhu Desai thanks his stars that he subscribed to the services of a private weather forecasting company. In February this year, the company sent Bhave an SMS, warning him that the weather would turn humid. Bhave quickly bought pesticides for his vineyard, knowing that pests would attack his crop when the humidity levels rose. His crop worth Rs 4.5 lakh was saved. The owner of the adjoining vineyard wasn’t as lucky: he lost a sizeable chunk of his crop to pests.

Last winter, the public sector Power Grid Corporation of India Limited managed to keep electricity grids in north India from tripping frequently by acting on prior information on the onset of heavy fog. It kept helicopters standing by to clean up the insulators that get wet and coated with pollutants during fogs, leading to short circuits. The result: there were fewer power outages.

Welcome to a fledgling new private business — weather forecasting. Till recently almost a government monopoly — apart from the Indian Air Force, only the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has been collecting weather data — private companies are now doing roaring business, supplying information on the weather to a host of clients, ranging from television companies and power utilities to insurance companies, farmers and commodity traders.

The New Delhi-based IMD, India’s official weather agency with over 500 weather stations all over the country, has been recording daily rainfall data for more than 130 years and temperature data for over a century. Ironically, though it was one of the first such agencies in the world, today one is rarely able to get its data in a readily accessible form. For instance, it posts raw data on its website —satellite images which even experts find hard to decipher. Newspapers and news agencies do get their maximum and minimum temperatures and rainfall data for cities and towns daily, but these are delivered as hard copies and not in a user-friendly format.

In contrast, private companies are adding value to the data and selling them as premium products. The private weather data market is booming. Jatin Singh, who in 2003 founded SkyMet, perhaps India’s first private weather forecasting firm, says that his Noida-based company has been growing by 35-40 per cent every year for the last six years. Some estimate the size of the market at Rs 100 crore.

These days nearly everybody appreciates reliable intimation regarding the weather. A farmer doesn’t want a good season to pass him by just as he does not wish to be surprised by an unseasonal rainy spell. Weather information is critical for electricity companies too. Since a couple of degrees’ drop in the temperature means a corresponding decrease in power consumption, and vice versa, prior information can help them decide whether they should buy or sell power. “If a state electricity board has to buy power at the last minute, it might end up paying three to four times more than usual,” says Prashant Goswami, a senior scientist at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS), Bangalore, which uses high-power computing to issue annual monsoon forecasts.

While SkyMet’s small team of meteorologists, consisting mainly of retired Indian Air Force officers, are trying to turn the firm into a “complete weather store”, others concentrate mainly on the smaller aspects of the weather business. National Collateral Management Services Limited (NCMSL), Mumbai, for instance, collects weather data from areas where the IMD does not have weather stations. Over the last five years, NCMSL has installed 497 weather stations in the country. “We cater mainly to insurance firms that provide crop insurance,” says Srinivasa Rao Gattineni, who heads NCMSL’s crop and weather intelligence group.

Then there is Weather Risk Management Services Limited, which operates from the IIT, Kanpur, campus and offers weather-related insurance services to farmers and commodity dealers. It also sells weather data from its network of weather stations.

Others too have jumped into the private weather business arena. About two years ago Thomson Reuters, the news organisation, launched a first of its kind service called Reuters Market Light (RML) for farmers. It offers subscribers information on weather and the commodity market about five times a day over mobile phones. “Each SMS costs the farmer less than the price of a cup of tea,” says Anand Kute, executive vice-president, marketing, at RML.

At present, RML can give weather-related information for an area of 50-km radius. But the company is planning to refine it further to a 20-km radius. That RML has been able to sign up over 100,000 farmers for the service in Maharashtra, Punjab and Haryana — the three states where the service is on offer — is a testament to its popularity.

In May this year, mobile phone-maker Nokia too entered the weather forecasting fray by launching a service called Nokia Life Tools Agriculture. Rendered through mobile service providers Airtel and Idea, it is available in 10 states. Subscribers can choose between two plans. A basic plan that costs Rs 30 a month provides daily weather updates and agriculture-related news, advice and tips. There’s also a premium plan, priced at Rs 60 a month, where subscribers get additional information on market prices for three chosen commodities at the nearest commodity market.

However, experts say that the burst of activity in India’s weather scene has nothing to do with any significant change in the quality of weather forecasts. “It is just that these companies are packaging the information in a much better way,” says a scientist who does not wish to be named. The scientist, who was involved in formulating a draft policy that envisaged a role for the private sector in weather data dissemination, says “It’s time the IMD learned to co-exist with private players.”

There are signs that IMD, which so far enjoyed a complete monopoly of Indian weather data (in fact, it once tried to block Goswami of C-MMACS from forecasting the Indian monsoon using his own model), is learning to live with competition. “We are not here for policing,” says IMD director general Ajit Tyagi when asked if the agency would seek to restrict private companies from making weather forecasts.

Significantly, most of these private firms depend heavily on the data put out by IMD. “The best of forecast models have problems in generating location-specific forecasts of temperature and rainfall, especially if the forecasts are for more than 24 hours,” says Madhavan Rajeevan, a scientist at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory, near Tirupati.

Rajeevan, who till recently headed IMD’s long-range monsoon forecasting division, says India should adopt the American model when it comes to weather. In the US, private firms are allowed to make weather forecasts but they take the basic information from national weather services. Moreover, they are run by trained meteorologists who are certified by the American Meteorological Society.

Will this happen in India too? With the weather business beginning to boom, some amount of fine tuning is likely to take place to give out quality information. And farmers like Bandhu Desai will be grateful for it.