Monsoon in north by first week of July

The south-west monsoon is expected over northern and parts of central India, reeling under the impact of a sharp rise in humidity, from the first week of July.

An active low pressure area over Telangana, Vidharbha, Marathwada and coastal Andhra Pradesh seems to have marginally impacted the progression of the monsoon. However, light to moderate showers might begin over north and central India in one or two days.

The low pressure area causing good rains in the coastal regions were now expected to move towards Goa and weaken thereby, which would pave the way for the forward movement of cloud-bearing rains towards the northern Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, western Uttar Pradesh and a few parts of Madhya Pradesh.

"Northern India will get good rains from the first week of July, which is also its usual time," a senior official from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. The south-west monsoon usually covers north-west India by July 1, but this year there was some possibility that rains could enter before-hand.

In its last weekly update on Wednesday, the IMD had forecast fairly widespread rainfall over north-west India from June 26 to July 10, 2016.

PTI on Monday reported that area under cotton in Punjab and Haryana had declined 27 per cent to 756,000 hectares in the 2016-17 crop year as farmers shifted to other crops after incurring huge losses due to whitefly pest attack last year.

"The low pressure area over Telangana, Vidharbha, Marathwada will gradually move towards Goa causing heavy rains there. From there, it will weaken, which will once again cause monsoon to move swiftly towards north India," Mahesh Palawat, chief meteorologist at Skymet Weather Services, told Business Standard.

Both IMD and Skymet have predicted above normal rains in 2016, with chances of the showers being strong during the latter half of the four-month southwest monsoon season that starts from June.

These two states had planted cotton on 103,000 hectares in the 2015-16 crop year (July-June). However, this is not expected to make a big dent on India's total cotton production in 2016-17 as the total production in both of them is less than 10 per cent of India's total annual cotton output.