On the fifth of July, in the middle of a season forecast to deliver nine-tenths of its rain, a depression formed over the northwest Bay of Bengal. It crossed the coast and settled over south Jharkhand and interior Odisha, wringing itself dry over the same two states for the better part of a week — while, at the very same moment, the Brahmaputra’s catchments in the northeast took spell after spell of extreme rainfall, and IMD’s own short-range outlook was warning the southern peninsula to brace for a subdued, rain-starved week ahead. Hold those three images together — a depression drowning the east, a river system swelling in the northeast, a peninsula going dry — and you are holding the central paradox of a deficit monsoon year: a season forecast to fall short, nationally, by a tenth still floods, locally, without contradiction.
“Below normal” is a figure calculated as a national average, and nobody actually lives inside a national average. By the middle of July, 397 of India’s 741 districts — considerably more than half the country — were running below normal on rainfall, even as other districts, hundreds of kilometres away, prepared for water to arrive too fast rather than too slowly. The machinery behind this split is the same machinery this cover story has spent its middle sections explaining: the monsoon trough is the rail line along which Bay of Bengal depressions travel inland, and wherever that trough happens to park for a few days, rain falls in genuinely destructive abundance, entirely independent of what the national ledger says about the season as a whole. The Western Ghats, similarly, decide who is shielded from a shortfall and who is left directly exposed to it, simply as a function of which side of the mountains a district happens to sit on.
The Fields’ Ledger
The kharif season opened with the weakest June since 2009, then genuinely fought back through the first half of July — but the fight was uneven across crops. By 10 July, national sowing stood 16 per cent behind the same date last year, and every major rain-fed crop was short of its usual pace: oilseeds down 3.13 million hectares against last year, coarse cereals down 2.86 million, pulses down 1.72 million, cotton down 1.44 million, rice down 1.08 million. Only sugarcane, largely irrigated and far less dependent on the monsoon’s timing, gained ground, up 0.86 million hectares. And because the worst of the season’s weather arrived exactly at sowing time, timing now matters as much as total acreage: crops sown late yield less regardless of how the rest of the season unfolds, and a still-strengthening El Niño — its conventional peak still months away, in December, rather than the September moment earlier assumed — means the standing crop faces mounting pressure right through its critical grain-filling stage.
The Home Ledger
Telangana’s season has produced this package’s single most eloquent statistic. By 8 July, only 41.79 per cent of the state’s normal kharif area had been sown — but the split behind that headline number tells the real story of how farmers actually respond to an unreliable sky. Cotton stood at 83.2 per cent of its normal sown area, soybean at 80.3 per cent, sugarcane at 64.4 per cent, red gram at 58.6 per cent, green gram at 55.4 per cent — while paddy, the crop most dependent on early, assured, standing water, collapsed to just 6.4 per cent, and groundnut to 9.8 per cent. Facing genuine uncertainty about whether the rain would arrive on schedule, Telangana’s farmers voted with their seed drills for the crops that forgive a dry start and against the one that does not forgive it at all. On 15 July, the state government formalised the same judgement from the other direction, activating a contingency plan built around short-duration, drought-resilient varieties — finalised in a joint session at ICRISAT’s Patancheru campus with scientists from CRIDA and IMD in the room.
The Water Ledger
Reservoirs tell the same story from underneath the fields. The 47 southern-region reservoirs monitored by the Central Water Commission held just 24.6 per cent of live capacity in the second week of July — against 60.4 per cent at the same point a year earlier, the steepest year-on-year fall of any region in the country. The other four regions fared better only in relative terms: eastern reservoirs at 27.4 per cent against 44.4 per cent last year, northern at 31.2 against 42.3, western at 42.5 against 52.9, central at 36.0 against 45.3. Every region in India is drawing down faster than it did twelve months ago, and the southern region — spanning both Telugu states — is drawing down fastest of all.
The Fever Ledger
The deficit conceals one final, crueller paradox. The dengue-carrying mosquito thrives specifically on moderate, scattered, standing rainfall — puddles, discarded containers, blocked drains — while genuinely heavy downpours flush those same breeding sites clean. A weak monsoon of stored water and irregular showers is, perversely, closer to an invitation than a discouragement for the mosquito, even as it starves the fields it falls beside. And wherever floodwater does arrive, in Jharkhand, Odisha, or the northeast, it carries its own separate prescription of risk — leptospirosis, cholera, and the general disease burden that follows standing and contaminated water anywhere it collects.
This is what a missing tenth actually looks like once it reaches the ground: a depression drowning two states inside a season officially short by ten per cent nationwide; cotton standing where paddy should be; reservoirs falling faster than they have in years; and fevers breeding in both the water that came and the water that didn’t. How India saw this coming — and how confidently it can say so — is the story this package turns to next.
– V Chandra Mouli
