The failure of rains in August over large parts of India has again raised the spectre of 2014 being declared a drought year. While the Met department expects the monsoon to revive in the next few days, the intensity and distribution of rains in the coming fortnight will be crucial.
As things stand, with three days left in August, the monsoon shortfall fits the India Meteorological Department’s definition of an all-India drought year. The overall monsoon deficit on Thursday was 18 per cent while 13 of the 36 meteorological subdivisions in the country — roughly 36 per cent of the subdivisions — faced moderate to severe drought.
An all-India drought year, according to IMD, is when the nationwide monsoon shortfall is more than 10 per cent, and 20 per cent to 40 per cent of the country faces drought conditions. Whether 2014 is declared a drought year will boil down to the extent of the monsoon’s resurgence in the fag end of the season.
“There are good signs of a monsoon revival in central India. However, the outlook for northwest India remains uncertain,” said D Sivananda Pai, the lead monsoon forecaster at IMD Pune.
Punjab, Haryana and western UP, meanwhile, stare at a severe drought.
Rain deficit grew in last 20 days, may not improve
India’s grain bowl belt of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh is reeling under a severe drought, with a major monsoon bailout looking unlikely at least in the next week or so.
Punjab and Haryana have run up rain deficits of 65 per cent and 66 per cent, respectively, and are currently the only two states where rainfall has been categorized as ‘scanty’ — that is, 40 per cent or less than normal since the onset of monsoon on June 1. Western UP is only slightly better with a current shortfall of 58 per cent.
IMD defines severe drought in a subdivision if it recieves less than 50 per cent of normal rainfall.
In at least 26 districts across this belt, rainfall has been less than 30 per cent of normal. This includes Barnala in Punjab which has received just 10 per cent rain and Rohtak which was got 11 per cent.
While IMD had predicted that the region would end up with the worst rain deficit in the country, the situation turned critical in the last 20 days. This is when the monsoon weakened, including a seven-day spell from August 15 when it went into a break because of a sustained weather disturbance in the Indian Ocean.
During this weak phase, central and northwest India went largely dry while the east, northeast and the coastal belt continued to get rain. The rain deficit in central India grew. But in Punjab, Haryana and western UP, an already bad monsoon year became worse. The outlook for the next week or so doesn’t look too good.
“While this region received scattered rains on Thursday due to the southward shift of the monsoon trough, there is at the moment no strong system in the vicinity that can cause persistent rain,” said BP Yadav, director, IMD.
Met officials said a substantial dent in the rain deficit of northwest India can come only if a succession of low pressure systems forms in the Bay of Bengal strong enough to reach so far inland. Thus far, these systems mainly benefitted central India during the active monsoon phase from mid-July to August first week.
The growing deficit has belied IMD’s expectations as well. The department in its latest monsoon forecast barely a month ago, had predicted near normal rains for August and September. While downgrading the overall monsoon forecast to 87 per cent (from 93 per cent predicted earlier), it said the two months together were likely to get 95 per cent rainfall of the long term average (with a model error of 8 per cent).
That forecast appears optimistic now. As of August 28, the all India weighted average rainfall for the month stands at 207. 9mm against a normal of 261mm for the entire month. This means the deficit, with three days of the month remaining, stands at more than 20 per cent. The rain gap in northwest India as a whole, stands at 34 per cent.
