AA Edit | Good Signs for Normal Monsoon

Any sign of the monsoon setting in is considered propitious in a country that is so very dependent on good rainfall to sustain its crop production levels and food security. The kharif sowing has been going on apace with the signs of early monsoon setting in this season, which, at 137 lakh hectares, is a matter for celebration as planting is up 10 per cent as compared to last year, and water levels in national reservoirs are 75 per cent above the 10-year average.

The Southwest Monsoon has covered the entire country by June 29, the quickest in the last five years since June 26, 2020. The signs so far are good in that the Southwest Monsoon has produced a surplus around 8 per cent in many of the areas it had covered in the south and west from its early onset this summer, which, on May 24, was eight days earlier than the normal date of June 1 over Kerala.

Scientists have reason to believe that monsoon seasons are being increasingly riven by extreme weather events like heat waves, cyclones and very heavy rainfall. They attribute this to climate change, due to which characteristics like intensity and frequency have undergone changes. Though it is no more a matter for alarm as much as a wake-up call for better preparedness to prevent the loss of lives, human and animal, patchy rains can trigger flash floods and landslides.

The vulnerability to heavier doses of rainfall in shorter periods of time and concentration in pockets is nowhere more apparent than in the ecologically fragile mountainous regions and we have had some early signs of this already in certain regions.

Minimising this would depend on measures being taken early rather than after the monsoon sets in.

An early setting in of the monsoon, driven by favourable atmospheric and oceanic conditions, is no guarantee that it will be a normal or surplus monsoon though, as luck would have it, India has had good monsoons over the last several years, with the last pronounced deficit year having been 2018. Nature’s way of rewarding patient farmers is an evenly spread monsoon and plentiful water for irrigation.