Ninety per cent rain fell in just three of monsoon’s 11 weeks

‘‘The variability of monsoon in time and space increases from east to the west of the country. Also where there is more variability, the rainfall is less. The issue of water management in critical in North-West India and South-East Peninsular India,’’ said Akhilesh Gupta, director, National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

While he and other forecasters are happy in getting the overall monsoon figures right (it is a normal monsoon year with the overall shortfall being just 5 per cent), they cannot but help notice the variability which means severe anxiety for farmers and meager recharge of groundwater.

Consider North-West India again: The first three weeks of July were very good. Then for the next six weeks, the area had deficient to scanty rainfall.

Just when these states had begun looking at ways to manage the moisture stress for various crops, the skies opened up again in the last week almost wiping out the bad averages in North-West India. In the beginning, the rice sowing was effected, by the end they rued the damage to the cotton crop by heavy showers.

In the last week, for example, West Rajasthan received 211 per cent of normal rain, Punjab received 122 per cent, Haryana, Chandigarh and Delhi received 201 per cent. With these figures being way above normal, the overall rainfall figures for the season do not look bad anymore.

The areas that improved their averages considerably as a result of last week’s rain are Jharkhand (from -37 per cent to -33 per cent), Punjab (-22 per cent to -11 per cent), West Rajasthan (-39 to -27 per cent) Coastal Andhra Pradesh (-18 per cent to -6 per cent) Jammu and Kashmir (-13 to -9 per cent), Haryana, Chandigarh and Delhi (-23 to -10 per cent) and Chhattisgarh (-18 to -12 per cent).

The forecast for the next few days is more rain for Andhra Pradesh, Vidarbha, South Orissa, Chhattisgarh, East Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Some of these averages will get even better.

The existing reservoirs are doing well—out of the 76 important reservoirs, there are 42 projects having storages more than 80 per cent, 14 projects have storage between 50 per cent to 80 per cent of designed live storage and 12 projects have storages more than 30 per cent. There are only eight projects have storage up to 30 per cent.

While reservoirs have served their purpose, the storage capacity of the country is far from satisfactory in a scenario where there is no model that will predict this variability of the monsoon to prepare anyone. Not just North West India, monsoon has been erratic throughout the country.

First, it arrived late— 10 days late from the Bay of Bengal, four days late over Kerala, nine days late in Mumbai, 12 days late in Bihar. However, instead of taking its expected two months to cover the entire country, it rushed in and hit Delhi two days in advance and Rajasthan 15 days in advance.

For agriculture, the first rains are extremely important and this upset farmers’ schedules who are so dependent on rainfall to start their sowing activity as well as irrigating their crops. ‘‘This time the Arabian Sea current was not powerful enough to begin with but the Bay of Bengal current was very strong. Monsoon normally takes 15 days to reach Eastern Uttar Pradesh to Delhi but this time, it took only three days,’’ explained Gupta.

This synergy between the two currents is evident from the fact that monsoon over North-East India is concurrent with monsoon over Kerala but this time there was a difference of 11 days between them.