Huge population and High Water Demand need the sustainable presence of water. But major water sources in India are Rivers and monsoon rainfall. Ground water level is depleting fast, and hence monsoon rainfall is the only hope to renew the surface and underground water sources.  But rainfall is becoming erratic. To sustain the rainfall over the Indian region, we need to understand the rainfall pattern first. Though various factors control rainfall occurrences one of the main factors as hypothesized in our research work is Forest Cover. For example, we have noticed that majority of the area in Maharashtra in the eastern aspect of Western Ghats are frequently facing droughts. Our Long term analysis of Rainfall revealed that lack of large area of Natural Forest cover could be the Major reason for this. We have proved that Forest attracts rainfall in our study.  Also, one can see increasing trend of rainfall in the Rajasthan and Punjab area which has some link to the increasing Green Cover due to various Water Conservation Measures and Canals. 

To verify the link between the presence of Forest and Rainfall we have taken the whole of Central India. Central India is a complex tropical forested landscape spread over five Indian states [Maharashtra (MH), Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chhattisgarh (CH), Odisha (OD), and Jharkhand (JH)], covering a total area of 986,580 sq. km, extending between 15–26° N and 72–88° E.

we investigated the dependence of the spatiotemporal distribution of rainfall on the spatial distribution of forests in the central Indian forested landscape. Specifically, in a natural experiment, we explored and compared quantitatively the spatiotemporal variability in rainfall
within (i) forested, (ii) adjacent non-forested, and (iii) agricultural regions. Furthermore, the aim was to measure the rate of change in rainfall in the presence and absence of forests across different buffer zones and the variability in rainfall in different elevations and density classes inside and outside forests. We used CHIRPS monthly rainfall data, MODIS normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), vegetation continuous field (VCF), and ASTER elevation data to examine the inter-annual and monthly variability in rainfall in the different strata. 

The published article can be seen at:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-023-04582-2