CLOUDS OF CRISIS

The year 2025 will be remembered as one in which normal rainfall masks an abnormal reality of destruction and weather extremes.

- Kiran Pandey and Rajit Sengupta

ON MAY 27, three days after the monsoon reached India, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast a near-normal rainfall for 2025. It even predicted normal rains in northwest India. On September 6, with less than a month left in the season, that forecast looks increasingly fragile. The country has cumulatively received 8.6 per cent surplus rain, keeping the near-normal prediction broadly intact. But the outlook for northwest India has gone drastically wrong.

IMD records rainfall in 727 of the country’s 738 districts. By September 6, at least 85 districts received large excess rainfall (60 per cent or more above normal) and another 164 saw excess rainfall (20-59 per cent above normal). This means one in three districts across India has been drenched by excess or large excess rain this season. The bulk of these lie in the northwest. Of the 208 districts analysed there, 60 per cent recorded excess or large excess rainfall.

The consequences have been devastating. India recorded extreme weather events on every one of the 92 days between June and August this year, according to “India’s Atlas on Weather Disasters”, maintained by the data centre of Delhi-based nonprofit Centre for Science and Environment and