Even as southwest monsoon was entering its third month and most parts of India were getting copious rain, it has given a miss to at least half of Telangana State including the capital Hyderabad and surrounding areas.
With monsoon playing truant, Hyderabad has recorded 39 per cent deficient rainfall, officials of Indian Meteorological Department in Hyderabad said.
While the rain was near normal in other half of Telangana including districts like Adilabad, Mancherial, Nirmal, Nizamabad, Khammam, the worst affected were Siddipet and Medak (39% deficient) and Sangareddy (38%).
Even Ranga Reddy, Viqarabad and Medchal around hyderabad were also deficient.
Weather officials said that monsoon this year was erratic over Telangana from the beginning and the present lull was likely to continue for another couple of weeks.
However they said there was nothing to worry as normally most of the rains for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana occur during the season of cyclonic storms in Bay of Bengal in the months of September and October.
At present the weather systems in the Bay of Bengal were far away from the coast of Andhra Pradesh and monsoon over the Telugu states will be revived once they move closer to the land.
While a good feature of the monsoon so far was heavy inflows into the major rivers of Godavari and Krishna from the upstream regions of Maharashtra and Karnataka, two major dams of Srisailam and Nagarjuna Sagar were still far from getting filled up.
As the rains have stopped in Karnataka the inflows of river Krishna and Tungabhadra have also come down.
Initial heavy inflows reaching the high of more than 170000 cusecs into Srisailam took the water level in Srisailam to 873.8 feet against the full reservoir level of 885 feet.
As the Krishna River Management Board has ordered the release of 52 tmcft of water from Srisailam to Nagarjunasagar dam from July 28 to August 22, the water level in Srisailam was likely to fall.
However officials Sailu this year the situation at Srisailam was far better than last year. The dam had 157.88 tmcft water on July 30 compared to only 19.56 tmcft same day last year.