India's meteorological department Monday predicted that the annual summer monsoon rains crucial for hundreds of millions of farmers would be below normal.
"The monsoon this year is likely to be 93 percent of the long-period average, with a margin of error of plus or minus five percent," said Bhukan Lal, director general of meteorology. The monsoon accounts for about 80 percent of the India's annual rainfall.
In India, a monsoon season is considered normal if the rains equal 98 percent to 102 percent of the long-period average.
Lal said that the data reviewed by the department, which includes sophisticated supercomputer-generated models, suggests that the monsoon would fall below those levels. "Estimates suggest that the probability of a deficient monsoon is 22 percent," Lal said.
The south-west monsoon normally starts in the first week of June, off the southern coast of Kerala and moves north to cover all of India by the middle of July.
The meteorology department said it would update the forecasts by the first week of July, which will also include forecast for the July rainfall over the country as a whole and seasonal (June-September) rainfall over the four broad homogeneous regions of India.