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The weather in September and the coming months is likely to help the present crops as well as Rabi (winter) crops for which sowing would begin next month.
The South-West monsoon is withdrawing later than normal this year. This will result in rains in southern parts of the country before the North-East monsoon sets in in these areas, according to the weather office. These rains would prove very useful for sowing of Rabi crops.
After the recent rains, 23 meteorological sub-divisions out of 36 in the country will have received normal or above-normal rainfall as compared to 22 last week. It translates to about 12 percent deficiency in overall monsoon rainfall.
These rains have also led to improved water-levels in reservoirs. Most of the reservoirs closely monitored by the Central Water Commission have normal or above-normal water levels. The total storage in 71 important reservoirs in the country was 84.21 billion cubic metre on 24th September as compared to 77.46 bcm last year and the average storage of last ten years, 94.62 bcm.
While 27 out of 71 projects were over 80 percent full, 19 had less than half of the designed live storage. Gobind Sagar (Bhakra) and Pong Dam in Himachal Pradesh and Rihand in Uttar Pradesh were the major reservoirs with water levels about half of their designed live storage.
The Crop Weather Watch Group meeting held today monitored position of crops and input availability nation-wide besides taking stock of weather and availability of water in reservoirs. Since it is late for sowing most kharif crops, no increase in area was reported for them. However, late sowing of rice has led to its area increasing by about 7 million hectare over last week’s 33.8 mha.
It also came out in the meeting that despite occurrence of pests and dry weather in parts of the country, oilseed production is not likely to be badly affected.
The weekly monitoring meeting was chaired by Shri RS Pandey, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture & Cooperation and was attended by representatives of ICAR, IMD, CWC, concerned divisions of the Agriculture Ministry and departments of Economic Affairs and Fertilizers.
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