Bracing for a below-average monsoon
With farms, food prices and growth all riding on the rains, India needs contingency planning now, not after the kharif season fails due to deficient rains
India’s monsoon has arrived, but it has not turned up for work. The Southwest Monsoon reached Kerala on June 4 — three days behind its normal schedule — and after a brief burst of progress, it has since stalled. By mid-June, the country was sitting on a 38 per cent rainfall deficit, with central India, the heart of the rain-fed farm belt, down 62 per cent. The India Meteorological Department had already lowered its seasonal forecast to 90 per cent of the long-period average, with a 60 per cent chance of a deficient season overall. The reasons: a strengthening El Niño, a neutral Indian Ocean Dipole, a weak Somali Jet, sluggish convection over the Bay of Bengal, and an absent assist from Pacific typhoon remnants.
Agriculture still employs nearly half of India’s workforce and contributes around 15 per cent of GDP, even though more than half the net sown area depends entirely on rainfall rather than irrigation. A weak or delayed monsoon does not just dent a harvest; it works through wages, mandi turnover, and the spending of hundreds of millions of rural households. Kharif sowing of pulses and cotton is already running behind last year. If the lull persists into July, paddy, soybean, oilseeds, and coarse cereals will bear the brunt.
The transmission to the wider economy is fairly direct. Food and beverages make up roughly 37 per cent of India’s CPI basket, and El Niño years have historically pushed food inflation about 1.7 percentage points higher than normal years. Every percentage point of rainfall shortfall against the long-period average has, on past form, shaved around 0.4 percentage points off agricultural value-added growth.
That feeds into the RBI’s calculations: a brief vegetable price spike can be looked through, but a season-long shortfall risks hardening inflation expectations and complicating any room for rate cuts. Rural demand for tractors, two-wheelers, and FMCG goods — which had a strong run in the first half of the year on the back of the rabi harvest — would lose its principal prop for the second half. A weaker rupee and a wider current account deficit are already being priced in by markets.
The encouraging counterweight is that India is not starting from scratch. Major reservoirs are filled well above the ten-year average, giving irrigation a buffer through the sowing window. Irrigation coverage itself has crept up from under half to 55 per cent of cropped area over the past decade. The right response now is to lean on these buffers deliberately rather than wait them out: release reservoir water in a calibrated, monitored manner; fast-track short-duration and drought-tolerant seed varieties for late sowing; expand crop insurance payouts and make claim processing faster, not just available; keep diesel and fertiliser supply chains, already strained by global disruptions, unblocked, and ensure the more than 300 districts under contingency watch actually have funded, district-specific cropping plans rather than templated advisories.
Monsoon forecasting has improved, but India’s vulnerability to a bad one has not gone away. The next six weeks of rainfall, not the next six months of policy statements, will decide how this season plays out.
