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| An uncertain monsoon |
| Business Standard / New Delhi Jun 22, 2009, 00:53 IST |
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There is as yet no serious damage to kharif prospects.
With the monsoon having revived after a nearly two-week hiatus, the worry about an inordinate hold-up in crop planting has faded — but only partly. The met office is still unsure of its further advance to the vast, largely rain-dependent agricultural lands in central India, notably the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, where even some drinking water sources have dried up because of deficient monsoon rainfall last year. The 45 per cent shortfall in rainfall in the first half of June has resulted in a further dip in the water level in several reservoirs that were drawn down during the intense summer.
Normally, the monsoon should have covered almost the whole country, barring the north-west, by June 20. But this year, after a reassuring beginning with its onset in Kerala on May 26, about a week ahead of schedule, its further progress got stalled from June 7 in the wake of the Aila cyclone in West Bengal. This cooled down the Bay of Bengal, preventing the development of any atmospheric trough that could pull the monsoon northwards into the country’s interiors. There has, thus, been a delay of nearly 10 days in the arrival of the monsoon in Maharashtra, Orissa and north Andhra Pradesh, and of at least a week in Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. This should not cause too much concern, provided the weather reverts to normal. The country’s key north-western agricultural belt gets monsoon showers only by the end of June. In any case, this region has a well-developed infrastructure for irrigation and does not rely entirely on the rains for seeding crops.
The bigger worry about this year’s monsoon has to do with the emerging signs, however faint, of an El Nino (the name given locally to the warming of the waters of the Pacific Ocean). Often, though not always, this has an adverse influence on the monsoon’s performance. The met office would not have known of this when computing its long-range monsoon prediction in April, which had said that total rainfall would be near normal, at 96 per cent of the long-period average of 89 cm for the season as a whole. But this should not dim hopes at this stage because the El Nino is still in its infancy and there is yet no certainty about what shape it will take in the next three months. There have been occasions when monsoon rainfall has remained normal despite the existence of a full-blown El Nino.
Two more risks remain, as in any year — a protracted break in the rains during the monsoon season and an early withdrawal of the monsoon. These are riskier for crop production than a delayed beginning, whose effect can be mitigated by opting for shorter-duration crops. If there are weather aberrations later in the season, there is little scope of salvaging standing crops and the investments made in them. Still, the watchword at this point has to be cautious optimism with regard to the monsoon and kharif prospects.
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