The country is likely to receive an average amount of rain in the 2021 monsoon, according to State-run weather office India Meteorological Department (IMD). The IMD’s forecast has raised expectations of higher farm and economic growth in Asia’s third-biggest economy, which is reeling from a surge in Coronavirus cases. 

Monsoon rainfall is expected to total 98 per cent of the long-term average, Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary M Rajeevan has told a virtual news conference. The IMD defines average or normal rainfall as between 96 and 104 per cent of a 50-year average of 88 cm (34 inches) for the entire four-month season beginning June. 

In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, agriculture has been a bright spot in India’s economy, and a good monsoon would help the sector and the countryside, Radhika Rao, an economist at DBS Bank in Singapore, has said. 

The monsoon, the lifeline of the country’s $2.9-trillion economy, delivers nearly 70 per cent of rains that India needs to water farms and recharge reservoirs and aquifers. Nearly half of India’s farmland, without any irrigation cover, depends on annual June-September rains to grow crops such as rice, corn, cane, cotton and soybeans. 

Farming accounts for nearly 15 per cent of India’s economy but sustains more than half of India’s 1.3-billion people. Monsoon rains lash the southern tip of Kerala around June 1 and retreat by September. 

“Most models show that La Nina conditions will convert to neutral conditions, and there is a very low chance of El Nino’s development during the monsoon season,” notes Mr Rajeevan. A strong El Nino, marked by a warming of the sea surface on the Pacific Ocean, can cause severe drought in Australia, South-East Asia and India. La Nina is an abnormal cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, triggering above-average rains.