Monsoon performance has great bearing on the agriculture which in turn has an effect on the economy. Good Monsoon boosts its morale while bad Monsoon leaves the country in despair causing several anxious moments. As forecasts are made much before the arrival of Monsoon, governments get enough time to make preparations and act in accordance .
Monsoon season was not that great for PM Modi as he did not see a good Monsoon year throughout his 5-year term.
The saga of bad Monsoon years or as we would like to call it the Modi Monsoon Jinx began in the year 2014. And since then, India has not observed a good Monsoon in the past five years.
In fact, 2014 was a drought year wherein Monsoon ended at 88 percent followed by another drought in the year 2015 with the Monsoon rain percentage dropping to a mere 86 percent.
While 2016 statistically was a normal Monsoon at 97 percent, it did leave large deficiencies in widespread areas. Along the spatial distribution was not good either. The states of Gujarat, Assam, Meghalaya, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, along with South Interior and Coastal Karnataka were all deficient during the 2016 Monsoon year.
Year 2017 was once again a below normal Monsoon year with rains being a percentage less than normal at 95 percent.
2018 narrowly managed to escape being a drought year. The deficiency was at 9.4 percent with the percentage of rains rounding off to 91 percent. However, had Pan-India rains been even 4-5 mm less, drought would have been haunting India again. Also, to be noted here is that 2018 was an evolving El Nino year but it got established in the winters.
The last good Monsoon year that India saw was in the year 2013 where the country had seen excess rains at 106 percent. This was also just a year before the Modi reign began.
Modi has once again won the Lok Sabha Elections and as luck may have it, this year also, Monsoon will commence under the shadow of El Nino conditions in the Pacific. This time, El Nino will run around beginning but will be a devolving one. Decline will start only after onset which means that the first half of the season will see lesser rains resulting in worst scenario for June.
June holds the key to large number of activities in terms of rains, particularly for agriculture including preparation of land for sowing etc. The start of Monsoon itself will be poor thus a cascading effect thereafter will be felt as the deficiency gets carried forward. Various activities will be affected.
El Nino conditions are creating uncertainty even now regarding the forecast of the second half of Monsoon and it does not look too bright. Let us hope that Modi and Monsoon Jinx is broken next year.
Image Credit: BBC.co.uk
Please Note: Any information picked from here must be attributed to skymetweather.com
