According to ministry of agriculture data released on Friday, kharif sowing so far has surpassed last year’s sowing marginally by 2%. The kharif crops have been sown in close to 560 lakh hectare.
The water levels at the country’s large reservoirs rose sharply for the first time in last few months — to 29% of their combined capacity on Friday from 18% of the capacity reported a week back. Till June 30, the water level was at an abysmal 15% of their combined capacity.The heartening part of the kharif sowing data is that pulses, whose prices have seen a sharp spike in last couple of month, have been sown in 71 lakh hectare which is 39% more than the previous year. Analysts say that this is expected to boost pulses production to around 20 million tonne (MT) in 2016-17 crop years from 17 MT reported in the previous year.
Thanks to above-normal monsoon rainfall in key rice-growing areas of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Chhattisgarh, rice sowing has just crossed the last year’s areas sown. Even oilseed sowing, which was lagging behind till last week, has got boost and the sowing is marginally higher than last year so far.
However, because of white fly pest attack in Punjab and inadequate rains in many key growing regions of Gujarat, cotton sowing declined sharply by more than 19% to 75 lakh hectare so far.
The agriculture ministry has also set the country’s grain production target at 270.10 million tonne for the 2016-17 crop year (July-June), up 6.7% from the actual grain production of 253.23 million tonne in 2015-16.
Meanwhile, India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said, “The southwest monsoon has been active over east Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand and normal over north-eastern states, West Bengal, and Bihar in last 24 hours”. According to IMD, the average volume of rainfall during June 1-July 15 has been more than 301 mm which is 1% more than the benchmark – Long Period Average (LPA). Till now, 32% of the area has got ‘excess’ rainfall while 54% have received ‘normal’ rainfall. Only 14% of the areas have received deficient rainfall.
With the exception of Saurashtra, Kutch, Gujarat and Bihar regions where rainfall has been ‘deficient’, most of the regions across the country has so far received ‘normal’ or ‘excess’ monsoon rainfall. IMD puts monsoon rains under four categories — <90% of benchmark (deficient), 90-96% (below normal), 96-104% (normal) and 104-110% (above normal) and >110% (excess).
After two successive years of deficient monsoon (2014 and 2015), IMD last month had reiterated its April prediction by stating that southwest monsoon would be ‘above normal’ rainfall at 106% of the benchmark LPA.