Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The all-India monsoon figure is one of the most quoted numbers in the Indian year, and one of the least useful. What it hides is now larger than what it reports.
India’s cumulative seasonal rainfall this monsoon is running about six per cent below normal — a modest-sounding shortfall, and a considerable recovery from the roughly 35 per cent deficit with which June ended before July closed marginally in surplus. The India Meteorological Department’s outlook for August put the month at about 97 per cent of the long period average, with the usual model error of plus or minus nine per cent, and the second half of the season is expected to be broadly normal. On that arithmetic, this is an unremarkable year.
The regional table tells a different story. The north-west has had above-normal rain. The east and north-east, central India and the southern peninsula have all had below-normal rain. Within that, Kerala is running roughly 45 per cent short, Jharkhand about 37 per cent and Bihar about 30 per cent. A state that is 30 per cent short does not experience a six per cent national average; it experiences a drought year. And a farmer does not sow against a national average, or even a state average — the operative unit is the block, and the operative question is not how much rain fell but whether it fell in the fortnight the crop needed it.
Where the average breaks down: paddy is the crop most exposed to the timing of rainfall rather than its seasonal total, which is why a normal national season can still produce a failed transplanting window in a single district.
Nobody sows against a national average. The operative unit is the block, and the operative question is timing, not total.
At a Glance
• All-India cumulative: about 6 per cent below normal
• June: ended around 35 per cent short
• July: closed marginally in surplus
• IMD August outlook: about 97 per cent of the long period average, ±9
• Above normal: the north-west
• Below normal: east and north-east, central, south peninsula
• Kerala: roughly 45 per cent short
• Jharkhand: roughly 37 per cent short
• Bihar: roughly 30 per cent short
• The unit that matters: the block, and the fortnight
This is a structural issue, not a feature of one year. Rainfall in India has been arriving in fewer, heavier events separated by longer dry spells, which means the same seasonal total now delivers less usable water: intense rain runs off rather than infiltrating, and a dry fortnight in the middle of the season does damage that a wet fortnight at the end cannot repair. The policy instruments built around the older pattern — large storage, canal command areas, a national declaration of a normal or deficient year — are calibrated to totals. The pattern has moved to timing.
There is a constructive answer, and much of it already exists in fragments. India runs one of the world’s denser automatic weather station networks and issues block-level agro-advisories; the gap is in acting on them. Three measures would close most of it: publish deficits at block level as the headline figure rather than the state or national aggregate; tie contingency seed availability — short-duration paddy, pulses, millets — to a block crossing a defined threshold rather than to a state declaration; and expand farm ponds and recharge structures in the districts that show the sharpest event-intensity trend rather than the lowest seasonal total. Each is administratively ordinary. Together they would replace a single national number that reassures with a set of local numbers that are actually usable — and in a country where more than half the cropped area is still rain-fed, that substitution is worth more than any forecast improvement.
