India’s monsoon sits 15 percent below average, on course for the driest season since 2009

India is heading for its weakest southwest monsoon since 2009. Cumulative rainfall from June through mid-September is 15 percent below the long-period average, the India Meteorological Department said. If that gap holds, the season will finish drier than any year since the 18 percent deficit of 2009. IMD had forecast a 10 percent shortfall in May. The live figure has overshot that outlook.

The shortfall is not even. The southern peninsula is 28 percent below normal. The east and northeast are 25 percent short. The northwest is 10 percent down. Central India is 6 percent down. June opened 40 to 42 percent below normal, the weakest start in 17 years, with 76 percent of the country then classed as deficient or largely deficient.

Reservoirs showed the same stress early. On 25 June the 166 major reservoirs that the Central Water Commission tracks held 26 percent of combined capacity. Indira Sagar was at 14 percent, Nagarjuna Sagar at 5 percent, Tehri at 2 percent. Later rains in central India trimmed some of that gap. They have not repaired the south or the northeast.

El Niño is the main driver. Sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have crossed thresholds that Indian and foreign agencies treat as a strong event. The pattern began to organise in June, is expected to peak around November and December, and may last into early 2027. That timing threatens a milder winter as well as a weak monsoon.

Christian Werner of Global Weather Climate Analytics said conditions could favour a Bay of Bengal cyclone in the last week of September. He does not expect that storm to close the national deficit. His working range for the finished season is a 13 to 16 percent shortfall. Mark Roulston’s CRUCIAL platform at Lancaster University, which aggregates specialist forecasts, assigns a 68 percent probability that the season ends 10 to 20 percent below normal.

Food inflation in August was 5.95 percent. A late, dry monsoon raises the risk that rice, pulses, oilseeds and sugarcane come in light, and that prices stay firm into the festival months. The farm economy still depends on June–September rain for about three-quarters of annual precipitation. Power demand stays high in El Niño years while hydro output falls, a combination already flagged in sector notes this month.

Withdrawal has begun to appear in the IMD maps. One official summary said the monsoon started pulling back from West Rajasthan around 19 September, five days later than last year’s 14 September date. A late withdrawal can still drop useful rain on pockets of the east. It rarely reverses a 15 percent national gap with less than two weeks on the calendar.

The comparison year, 2009, is the right reference because it was also an El Niño monsoon that finished 18 percent below normal and pushed food prices. 2015 was the last season in the same band. Years immediately before 2026 ran above the long-period average, including a recent 108 percent season, which is why the present 85 percent reading feels abrupt.

What a reader can take from the IMD sheet is simple. The country is not waiting on one more depression to save the season. The south and the northeast are already too far behind. Policy and markets will now work with a double-digit rainfall deficit and an El Niño that has not yet peaked.