5 days before the Budget, a silver lining for finance minister

NEW DELHI: Rainfall in the first four weeks has been among the worst ever while its distribution has been as poor as in the drought year of 2014, but the situation is improving as the monsoon has revived in the past week, and crop planting can quickly reach normal level if the country gets good rainfall in the next two weeks.As in 2014, the first of two successive years of poor monsoon, June rainfall has been normal or excessive in only about a quarter of the districts, with the rest being largely dry. This is bad for agriculture as half of the total farmland depends entirely on rains for water.Total rainfall so far in June is 35% below average, but it is already much better than the deficit of 43% last week. As a result, crop planting — which was 12% below normal a week ago — is now about 10% less than normal for this time of the year.The progress of the monsoon, which delivers about three-quarters of India’s annual rainfall, is a key determinant of agri output and rural incomes.These in turn influence demand for consumer goods, gold and automobiles in rural areas, where two-thirds of Indians live.Weather scientists say the initial phase of the monsoon was marred by adverse climatic conditions. The El Nino phenomenon had started developing which delayed the onset of the southwest monsoon by a week and severely retarded its northward movement.69997263 The threat of El Nino has now ebbed, which has helped the monsoon regain momentum.Further, another phenomenon called the Indian Ocean Dipole, which measures the temperature difference between the eastern and western part of the water body, had turned favourable for the vital monsoon system in India.When June rainfall is bad, total June-September rainfall has often been well below normal but there are notable exceptions like in 1926, when June was 48.3% below average but an exceptionally wet August rainfall made the total rainfall 7% higher than normal.In the last 50 years, June rainfall has been worse only in 2014 and in 2009, when farmers were ravaged by the worst drought in 37 years.The weather office has predicted heavy rainfall in western and northern India from the middle of next week. The recent spurt of rainfall has improved the situation in the main grain producing states of Punjab and Haryana as well as Odisha, Bihar, Gujarat, Telangana and parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. However, rainfall has declined in some parts of Saurashtra, Tamil Nadu and eastern Rajasthan in the past week.The weather office has stood by its initial forecast of monsoon rainfall being 96% of average in the June-September season.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/31ZqPcV