In 12 states there are 299 districts which have been declared by their state governments as affected by drought.

We know which districts these are, and the central and state governments have announced repeatedly since September 2009 what measures are being taken to lessen the impacts of crop losses and livelihood shock.

What I failed to see in all forms of reportage on the subject was: how many people are affected? There was no mention in the government bulletins, there has been no estimate made by the agri academic network, and of course the media won't make the effort.

It has proven tedious, finding the numbers and working on them, but the result is a shock: at least 459 million!

They may not all be people belonging to rural farming households, but there is a very good likelihood that in their families, there is at least one direct way in which they are linked to cultivation, livestock, agri inputs or selling produce.

It is an enormous number, and the surprise is that we haven't seen it yet, even at state level. The data comes from the Census Bureau, using the 2001 district rural population totals and using an annual inflator for the period 2001-2011 provided by the Bureau.

The rest was a matter of getting the list of district names to match the 'drought' districts.

Here is the state list:

Andhra Pradesh	60,192,000
Assam	25,484,000
Bihar	56,155,518
Himachal Pradesh	5,944,000
Jharkhand	23,547,000
Karnataka	28,599,566
Maharashtra	53,560,803
Manipur	1,775,000
Madhya Pradesh	35,442,875
Nagaland	1,818,000
Rajasthan	42,943,833
Uttar Pradesh	124,236,290
Total 299 districts	459,698,885

And here is a list of 25 districts with the highest rural populations among the 299:

		District 2009	%age of rural
St.	District	rural popn	popn in dist.
UP	Allahabad	4,296,930	75.55
UP	Azamgarh	4,197,028	92.45
UP	Jaunpur	4,173,584	92.60
AP	East Godavari	4,073,785	76.50
BIH	Muzaffarpur	3,888,762	90.70
UP	Sitapur	3,672,037	88.05
UP	Sultanpur	3,528,704	95.26
MAH	Ahmadnagar	3,466,428	80.11
AP	Guntur	3,454,328	71.20
UP	Hardoi	3,446,228	88.01
BIH	Gaya	3,430,031	86.30
AP	Mahbubnagar	3,414,341	89.43
KAR	Belgaum	3,388,382	75.97
BIH	Saran	3,375,774	90.81
AP	West Godavari	3,316,613	80.26
MAH	Nashik	3,272,912	61.20
MAH	Pune	3,246,651	41.92
UP	Ghazipur	3,231,019	92.32
AP	Chittoor	3,188,642	78.35
UP	Kushinagar	3,180,853	95.42
BIH	Patna	3,154,918	58.43
AP	Krishna	3,090,369	67.92
RAJ	Jaipur	3,072,489	50.64
AP	Nalgonda	3,058,764	86.68
AP	Karimnagar	3,056,271	80.56

When the central and state administrations roll out their drought management programmes, you would expect them to have in mind the number of people, block by block and tehsil by tehsil, they need to reach. I find it disturbing that the language emerging from the drought-control measures has, with a few exceptions only, been focused on "saving rabi" and "shortfalls". What about the people?