1 - Introduction

Summary

I grew-up seeing dewfall, fog and frost in my village in UP. Dewladen blades of grass, glass panes and assorted other objects with dew water on the surface were a common sight on winter mornings. It felt good walking barefoot on grass, leaving footprints or a swath that would remain visible for a few moments. Fog was also often present in the morning. Frost occurred less often. When it did, it would cause some anxiety among our neighbours, many of whom were farmers.

I encountered dew as a subject several years later, as an undergraduate at Allahabad Agricultural Institute, in a hydrology course. The instructor mentioned dew as one of three forms of precipitation, rainfall and snow being the other two. But he stated that snow was not all that important in India and dew even less so. So the rest of that course, and the others that I went through later, dealt only with the rainfall. I continued to think of dewfall as phenomena of only the winter season, and something of no practical significance. This has now changed. Encounter with dewfall in the arid, coastal areas of Kutch has shown that it is a phenomenon that occurs in summer months as well. And the quantity of water one can collect is not negligible.

We had started a research project in greenhouse cultivation in a village, Kothara, in this district near the Arabian Sea coast.