Concerns over the week-long stalling of the monsoon progress have ebbed on Thursday, with both the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and private weather forecaster Skymet seeing an imminent revival of the rains. Reuters reported quoting senior IMD officials that, the southwest monsoon is set to bring rains over central parts of India “in the next few days,” providing much-needed respite from the heatwave in the northern plains.
Skymet said in an article posted on its website: “Conditions are becoming favourable for the advancement of monsoon over the eastern states of the country and proceed beyond in the next 3-4 days. On June 23, a trough is forming and running across West Uttar Pradesh to East Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and North Bengal. It is likely to get consolidated the next day and will have an embedded cyclonic circulation over East Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It will be strengthened further and a tight circulation will be marked over central parts of Uttar Pradesh on June 25,”
The IMD had predicted ‘above normal’ monsoon rainfall at 106% of benchmark average during June-September this year with 92% chances of the rains being in the “normal-to-excess” range.
However, the rains, which had hit Kerala coast two days ahead of schedule and arrived in the North-East six days the before normal date, remained at a standstill since June 12. That meant barely 40% of the geographical area of the country was covered in two weeks after onset.
The department therefore downgraded its forecast for June rainfall from “normal” to “below normal” even as it maintained that the rainfall would still be very good during July-September.
The halting of monsoon has caused apprehensions in the farming community over the prospects of kharif sowing, in north and north-west India.
Meanwhile, IMD on Thursday predicted “very heavy” rainfall over Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra over the next five days. It said the sky will be generally cloudy in Mumbai, with possibility of moderate-to-heavy rains. It also observed that monsoon has advanced into more parts of Vidarbha, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bay of Bengal, West Bengal and Bihar.
Skymet added: “Monsoon progress on the western side may remain slow and sluggish. The state of Gujarat will witness the true colour of the monsoon in the fag end of the month, between 26th and 29th June. Overall, it could be a repeat of last year, when the monsoon covered the entire country, ahead of its schedule.”
Though the weather forecaster sees a somewhat skewed pattern of rain distribution, with some of the paddy-growing areas in east and north India poised to receive below-normal rains, the mostly rain-fed “monsoon core zone” in central India has been predicted to witness above-normal precipitation. This augured well for the agriculture sector which saw a 4.4% annual decline in output (gross value added) in the 2023-24 crop year (July-June), after a steady rise witnessed for six straight years.
The finance ministry subsequently stated that the forecast of above-normal monsoon in 2024 boded well for a good harvest, easing inflation concerns.
On Wednesday, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) paper said, the prospects for agriculture are brightening with the early landfall of the southwest monsoon. “Headline inflation is gradually easing, driven by sustained softening of its core component, although the path of disinflation is interrupted by volatile and elevated food prices,” it said.
“The fact that the ongoing disinflation is being driven by the softening of the core component of consumer price index (CPI) inflation to a new low validates the stance of monetary policy. As long as food price pressures persist, however, the goal of aligning inflation with its target remains a work in progress,” the paper added.