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NEW DELHI, Aug. 5

AROUND three-fourths of the districts in the country have received deficient, scanty or no rains at all during the first-half of the monsoon season extending from June 1 to July 31.

According to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), 208 out of the country's 515 districts (for which information has been collected) have received `deficient' rainfall, i.e. shortfall exceeding 20 per cent relative to the particular area's historical long period average (LPA) level. Further, rainfall has been `scanty', i.e. shortfall in excess of 60 per cent, in another 174 districts, with two districts recording no rainfall at all during this two-month period.

In other words, as many as 384 districts (i.e. 74.6 per cent of the total) have received very poor rainfall precipitation during the monsoon season, which means almost three-fourths of the country is now faced with imminent drought and massive loss of farm incomes.

The country as a whole has received an average area weighted rainfall of 329.8 mm during June-July, which is nearly 30 per cent below the LPA of 470.8 mm for this period. This makes it a `deficient' monsoon in overall terms — the first-ever since 1987.

As many as 26 out of the 36 meteorological sub-divisions have recorded deficient rainfall during these two months. Rainfall has been `normal' in nine and `excess' in one sub-division.

But the term `normal' can be misleading given that as per the IMD's definition, a sub-division can record normal monsoon even if its rainfall is below the LPA, provided this shortfall is contained within 20 per cent. If one takes this fact into consideration, 33 out of the 36 divisions have this year received rainfall levels below their corresponding LPAs.

Rainfall has been above LPA only in three sub-divisions: Sub-Himalayan West Bengal (plus 35 per cent), Gangetic West Bengal (plus five per cent) and Bihar (plus 17 per cent). The monsoon has also been `normal', although below LPA, for Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand (minus seven per cent each), Madhya Maharashtra (minus 19 per cent), Marathwada (minus 11 per cent), Vidarbha (minus 15 per cent), Assam & Meghalaya (minus five per cent) and Nagaland-Manipur-Mizoram-Tripura (minus nine per cent).

The rest of the country stretching from Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in the North to Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh in central India and Orissa and the entire southern belt have recorded deficient-to-scanty precipitation in the first-half of the current season.

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