Monsoon back to normalcy, improves crop sowing

Finally, with higher rainfall in the last two weeks, the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) of Kolkata has declared it normal monsoon in West Bengal.

According to G C Debnath, the director of RMC Kolkata, the deficit in rainfall has come down to 18% which is within permissive limit to consider it as normal. The RMC informs that the South West Monsoon has been active and there has been isolated heavy to very heavy rainfall over North Bengal and Gangetic West Bengal.

With the improved performance of monsoon, the state agriculture department is happy as that changed the otherwise worsening scenario of Aman paddy cultivation in the state.

 

According to Paritosh Bhattacharjee, director, department of agriculture, in the last two weeks with the increase in rainfall, sowing of paddy in most of the districts in South Bengal has improved a lot.

While in North Bengal’s five districts the average rainfall has been to the extent of 102%, rainfall in South Bengal’s Bankura district has been up to 96%, Hoogly 95%, Howrah 90%, North 24 Parganas 87%, Nadia 85%, South 24 Parganas 83% and Birbhum and Purulia got 82% each. Murshidabad, West Midnapur and East Midnapur got less amount of rainfall, where rainfall has been over just 72%. As of now, the average rainfall in the state has been 87.22%.

The total area under paddy cultivation during the Aman season is 42.9 lakh hector, of which the North Bengal has covered 100% of the land and the South Bengal covered 83%.

According to officials of the state agriculture department, traditionally the sowing period was set to be between June 21 and August 15 every year.

But, off late, the monsoon has started behaving erratically and more often than not initially it remains quite week and becomes active late.

Keeping that in mind, the agriculture department started encouraging the farmers to go for late sowing.

So, it hopes that with the monsoon being proactive now, the farmers in South Bengal districts will complete the sowing by August 31 and the state will have good harvest this year too.