In the tropics the most important climatic element for agriculture is rainfall. The dependence of Indian agriculture on monsoon rainfall is well known (Swaminathan, 1983); in fact, the Indian economy has been described as a gamble on the monsoon rains. We thus expect any climatic change involving a large-scale change in rainfall to have a significant impact on agricultural productivity. However, as pointed out in Section 1, there is no evidence for long-term increasing or decreasing rainfall, either for the Indian region as a whole or for meteorological subdivisions of the country. Thus, in the Indian context, it is more pertinent to analyze impacts of climatic variability rather than of climatic change.