India’s monsoon rains expected a week late

MUMBAI // Monsoon rains are expected to arrive on India’s southern Kerala coast by June 7, about a week later than usual, the country’s weather office said on Sunday.

The monsoon season delivers 70 per cent of India’s annual rainfall, which is crucial for agriculture and economic growth that has been hampered by back-to-back droughts.

The delay, announced by the India meteorological department, will prolong a drinking water shortage and delay planting of crops from rice to cotton and sugar cane.

Two-thirds of India’s population depends on farming.

About half the country’s farmland lacks irrigation, and farmers have blamed prime minister Narendra Modi’s government for a slow response after the droughts ravaged their crops in 2014 and 2015.

Southern Kerala state will start receiving the seasonal rains from June 7, the state forecaster said. The normal onset date for monsoon is June 1 and the forecast has a margin of error of four days, it said.

India is counting on normal rainfall this year to control food prices and provide relief to hundreds of millions of people grappling with one of the nation’s worst droughts since independence from British rule in 1947, following two years of poor rain.

The monsoon waters about half of the nation’s crop land, where more than 800 million people live in villages and depend on farming. Agriculture accounts for roughly 18 per cent of the nation’s $2 trillion gross domestic product.

The June-September rainfall is seen at 106 per cent of a 50-year average, according to the weather bureau. Precipitation was 14 per cent below average last year, preceded by a 12 per cent shortfall in 2014, data from the bureau show. The onset over Kerala signals the arrival of monsoon over the Indian subcontinent and represents the beginning of rainy season over the region.

“There is a lag in seasonal transition from pre-monsoon to monsoon and we are observing it,” DS Pai, head of the long-range forecasting division at the weather office, said on Sunday.

The Reserve Bank of India lowered its key interest rate for the first time in six months on April 5 and governor Raghuram Rajan has said he would watch the performance of the monsoon to look for more room to ease.

Food prices are a key determinant in whether Mr Rajan will achieve his goal of keeping inflation within 5 percent by March 2017. Data on Thursday showed consumer prices rose 5.39 per cent in April.

* Reuters and Bloomberg