India's Monsoon

Forget Bollywood's classic songs, the most welcome sound in India is the pitter-patter of the first monsoon rains. If all goes well, oppressive heat gives way to thunderous downpours around early June, unleashing the annual season of rejuvenation that delivers 80 percent of India's rainfall in four frantic months. Yet monsoons are erratic, perhaps increasingly so because of climate change. And when they disappoint, food prices soar, the poor go hungry, reservoirs empty and power cuts hamstring businesses. The impact even ripples overseas as commodity markets are starved of Indian sugar and rice. About 800 million of the country's 1.3 billion people count on agriculture for a living, yet less than half of its farmland has access to irrigation. That underlines the dependence on India's fickle four-month deluge and raises the question: What more should be done to accommodate the vagaries of the monsoon?

After three of the past four monsoons fell short, plunging parts of the nation into severe drought, the outlook for 2018 is better. Early forecasts call for rainfall close to the 50-year average. That would be a relief after recent disappointments: The 2015 monsoon was the driest in six years because of El Nino and followed a poor monsoon in 2014, leaving major cities such as Mumbai rationing water supplies. There was some respite in 2016, when overall rainfall fell into the definition of what's termed normal — within 4 percent of the 50-year average. However, the 2017 rainy season delivered just 95 percent of that average, with almost one-fifth of the country receiving insufficient rainfall and some reservoirs in the south drained to about half-capacity. Poor monsoons delay planting and produce smaller yields of crops such as rice, corn, sugar cane and oilseeds. That can accelerate food inflation, a key focus for a central bank seeking to lower interest rates and a disaster for the millions of Indians mired in poverty. It got so bad that in 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi refocused government policies on agriculture, fast-tracking irrigation projects and extending record lending to farmers.