India Logs Its Fifth-Driest June Since 1901 as Monsoon Lags
Rain ran nearly 40% below normal for the month, with no low-pressure systems forming and El Nino building, before the monsoon finally turned toward Delhi.
India came through June with 99.5 mm of rain against a normal of 165.3 mm, a shortfall of 39.8% and, by the India Meteorological Department's count, the fifth-driest June since national records began in 1901.
The number is stark for a month that is supposed to open the southwest monsoon, the source of about 70% of the country's annual rainfall and the pulse the farm calendar runs on. Below 100 mm for June has happened only four times in more than a century of records; the driest of them was 2009, at 87.5 mm. This June sat just above that floor.
The IMD points to two mechanisms, and neither is exotic. No low-pressure systems formed over the Bay of Bengal during the month — those systems are the engines that drag moisture inland and spread it. And a developing El Nino, the Pacific warming that tends to suppress Indian monsoon rain, was building through the period. Absent the first and working against the second, the rain simply did not organise.
The shortfall was not spread evenly. Of 36 meteorological subdivisions, 24 recorded deficient rainfall and three fell into the "large deficient" band. The monsoon itself was late off the mark, reaching Kerala on 4 June, three days behind the normal onset date of 1 June, after first touching the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on 16 May.
What a dry June means depends heavily on what July does. June rain matters for sowing the kharif crop (rice, pulses, cotton and soybean), so a late, thin start can push planting back and lean harder on irrigation in the meantime. The relief, if it holds, is that the IMD expected the monsoon to advance into Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and all of Jammu and Kashmir within two to three days, the surge that usually carries the season's heaviest totals. A slow June is recoverable; a slow July would not be.
The wider frame is a familiar one this summer, as record heat has gripped Europe and strained power grids in the same weeks. The figures here come from the India Meteorological Department, with the monsoon's progress detailed by Open Magazine and Reuters.
For a country where a season's rain still moves food prices and rural incomes, the arithmetic is unforgiving: the clouds now over Delhi have a month's deficit to make up, and not much time to do it.
