Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s farm season is entering its most important weeks under a cautious forecast. The India Meteorological Department expects July rainfall to stay below normal — under 94% of the long-period average — and the numbers so far bear the caution out: cumulative rain through early July ran roughly a fifth below average, leaving kharif sowing behind last year’s pace just as the peak planting window for rice, pulses and oilseeds opens.
The story is really one of distribution. The shortfall has been sharply uneven — a deep deficit across east and north-east India, milder gaps in the north-west and centre, and a surplus in the south. That patchiness, more than the all-India figure, is what worries planners, because it decides which districts get their fields planted on time and which must wait on a revival. A dry June, among the weakest in decades, deepened the early gap.
A monsoon is never judged on a single week. The question is whether the system can carry a farmer through a dry patch to a wet one — and increasingly it can.
There is real reason for measured confidence. The monsoon frequently revives in the second half of the season, and India’s buffers have grown sturdier: comfortable foodgrain stocks, expanding irrigation cover that lessens the dependence on any single spell of rain, and an agricultural digital backbone that puts weather advisories, soil-health data and market prices within a farmer’s reach. Together they blunt the impact of a slow start in a way that was harder a decade ago.
The constructive way forward is to lean on that resilience while the rain catches up: keep reservoir management and contingency seed plans ready for the driest districts, steer short-duration and drought-tolerant varieties to late-sown fields, and use the agri-stack to target advisories where the deficit bites hardest. Handled early, a below-normal July becomes a challenge to manage rather than a shock to absorb — and the season still has time to turn.
