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The ‘Great Indian Desert’ could disappear within a century

Each year, the South Asian monsoon deluges the verdant east of India and leaves the west, where India and Pakistan share a border, bone-dry. That asymmetry, between the Himalayan rainforests and the “Great Indian Desert”— the most populated in the world — has shaped civilizations. But as climate change heats up, the monsoon is moving farther west into this region. Within a century, a new study suggests, the desert could disappear completely.