This May has been rather wet, with India as a whole receiving 68.4 per cent more than the normal rainfall for the month so far. And it isn’t just rain. No record-breaking temperatures or significant heatwaves enveloping large parts of the country have been reported. Intermittent showers — enabled both by western disturbance winds carrying moisture from the Mediterranean Sea towards the Subcontinent and similar incursions from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea — have contributed to a wetter and cooler-than-usual summer this time. The pre-monsoon season from March 1 to May 23 has cumulatively reported 16.8 per cent above long-period average precipitation, with as many as 27 out of the total 36 meteorological subdivisions recording 20 per cent or more surplus rain. Each thunderstorm has brought down temperatures just when heat conditions were building up.
While all these have made the ongoing summer relatively bearable, the impact of that, if any, on the monsoon itself remains to be seen. The India Meteorological Department has forecast above-normal rainfall for the monsoon season (June-September) based on there being no El Niño this time. The Indian Ocean Dipole, too, is expected to be in “neutral” state. These two ocean indicators known to influence the monsoon are favourable, just as the southwesterly moisture-laden winds blowing from the Indian Ocean are well in place. But the monsoon also depends on so-called heat lows developing over northwest India. The intense solar heating of the landmass during the summer creates the low-pressure area that acts as a suction device for drawing in moist air from the monsoon trough. While the monsoon can turn out deficient due to the absence of any proper heat low formation, the hope is that it will be compensated for by the favourable oceanic and atmospheric wind factors.
A good monsoon will be the icing on the cake for an economy that has emerged from a prolonged period of high food inflation, roughly between July 2023 and December 2024. The best measures of relief on that front are annual consumer food price inflation falling to a 42-month-low of 1.8 per cent in April and wheat stocks in government warehouses climbing to a four-year-high on May 1. While that, in conjunction with easing international food and commodity prices, offers some comfort, the monsoon’s performance will still matter. Policymakers and economic agents should brace themselves for the quantum of rainfall as well as its spatial and temporal distribution during the upcoming four-month season being subpar. That would seem an outside possibility for now — the monsoon may, for many in the south, have already arrived — but it is not to be discounted.
