CORRESPONDENCE CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 107, NO. 11, 10 DECEMBER 2014 1779 in the last 14 years as out of the four El Niño years globally, three resulted in droughts in India. The drought of 2002 is a classic example of a strong El Niño phenomenon as the SW monsoon rainfall in India dropped by more than 19% from its long period average. Consequently, foodgrain production decreased by 18% and agriculture GDP dropped by 7% causing a loss of 8 billion USD. According to the researchers at Uni- versity of Reading, UK, El Niño could be quite devastating for agriculture and water supply in India as two-thirds of Indian farmland lack irrigation and rely solely on rainfall 6 . El Niño resulting in deficit rainfall tends to lower the produc- tion of summer crops such as rice, sugar- cane, cotton and oilseeds. The ultimate impact is seen in the form of high infla- tion and low gross domestic product growth as agriculture contributes around 14% to the Indian economy 7 . In the past, the impact of severe droughts has remained between 2% and 5% of our GDP 6 . According to the report of the As- sociated Chamber of Commerce and In- dustry of India, about 5% deficit in rainfall due to possible El Niño factor could have a bearing on economic growth by 1.75% costing about Rs 180,000 crores in the 2014–15 fiscal 8 . With every 1% deficit in rainfall, the country’s GDP falls by 0.35%, as 60% of net sown area of India is rainfed. 1. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2014/jun/11/-sp-el-nino-weather-2014 2. Stone, R. C., Hammer, G. L. and Marcus- sen, T., Nature, 2006, 384, 1896–1909. 3. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-envi- ronment-27393087 4. http://www.icrier.org/pdf/working_paper_ 276.pdf 5. Gadgil, S., Curr. Sci., 2014, 106(10), 1335–1336. 6. Gadgil, S. and Gadgil, S., Econ. Polit. Wkly, 2006, XLI, 4887–4895. 7. http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/how-el- nino-impacts-monsoon-rainfall-in-india/1/ 205679.html 8. www.assocham.org/prels/shownews.php?- id=4490 H. R. GAUTAM 1, * H. L. SHARMA 2 ROHITASHW KUMAR 3 M. L. BHARDWAJ 4 1 Department of Plant Pathology, Dr Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni 173 230, India 2 Department of Economics, Government Degree College, Barsar, District Hamirpur 174 305, India 3 Division of Agricultural Engineering, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Srinagar 191 121, India 4 Department of Vegetable Science, Dr Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni 173 230, India *e-mail: hrg_mpp@yahoo.com Not just subjective, but also sloppy – a response to Bhadra We read Bhadra’s rejoinder 1 to our letter 2 with interest and disappointment. Not only has she failed to counter the main criticisms of our response to Majumder et al. 3 , she has made fairly serious alle- gations of scientific impropriety on our part. She has also alleged that we have inflated figures of dog bite cases in India by three orders of magnitude. Unfortu- nately, her conclusion is flawed and arises from a misreading and misunder- standing of both our original statement as well as the primary literature that was cited. In her rejoinder, Bhadra has alleged that ‘Vanak et al. have conveniently con- verted 17,137 to 17 million, and this increase by three orders of magnitude cannot be a typographical error’ and fur- ther states that ‘It is alarming and at the same time depressing to see such blatant misrepresentation of data’. Instead, in our article we state that ‘…that the “part” of the human popula- tion that they are referring to is an estimated 17–20 million Indians/year that suffer from dog bites. Tragically, this results in a person dying from dog-contracted rabies every 30 min’. Thus, we find her allegations baffling. We are clearly referring to the number of dog bite cases as 17 million, which is derived from Sudarshan et al. 4 , and not the number of rabies cases (which at 1/30 min/yr = ~17,500). Bhadra has confounded these two issues. She has taken the cases of annual rabies in India and converted them to dog bite cases in her claim that ‘This is also substantiated by that data provided by Sudarshan et al., that 2 in every 100,000 humans are bitten by dogs every year’. Sudarshan et al. 5 , actually report 2 in 100,000 as being the annual incidence of rabies. She seems to have also neglected to fully read the two additional citations she refers to, which state similar figures. Menezes 6 provides an estimate of 15 mil- lion dog bite cases in India, while Sudar- shan 7 states that 1.7% of the population is affected by dog bites annually. Thus, the error in reporting numbers is not at our end, but rather on Bhadra’s, and her accusation of scientific impropriety is completely unwarranted. Bhadra has also failed to address the major criticisms we presented, often ob- fuscating or self-contradicting herself in her response. For example, she states that ‘In IISc too, reports of dog–human con- flict are not rare, and there are several instances of people being chased by dogs’, as a justification for choosing this site for her study. However, Majumder et al. 3 claim that they found no evidence for such dog–human conflict inside IISc campus. Bhadra attempts to justify this as well, by saying that ‘…1941 dogs would be a small percentage of the total population, which explains why we could have missed out a few rare cases of dog– human aggression during our surveys’. So is dog–human conflict rare or not? We would also like to reiterate that the data sampling by Majumder et al. 3 is flawed, since samples are non-indepen- dent. However, this is eclipsed by the other problems in the paper. We do not wish to belabour these points any further, but we do urge