IMD forecasts a below-normal July after one of the driest Junes on record

The India Meteorological Department expects India to receive below-normal rainfall in July, the wettest month of the southwest monsoon season, with monthly rainfall forecast at less than 94 per cent of the long-period average. The monthly outlook was issued on Tuesday, June 30, and it lands on a country that has just recorded one of the driest Junes in the history of the data series.

The word for July is not whether it will rain. It is whether there will be enough of it, spread across enough of the country, at the right point in the sowing calendar. That is a different question, and the IMD's answer to it is qualified rather than reassuring.

Why July carries the season

July normally delivers the largest single share of seasonal monsoon rainfall. The long-period average for the month is 280.4 mm, calculated over 1971-2020. Rain-fed crops sown in the window — paddy, pulses and oilseeds — depend on it, as do reservoirs that were drawn down through a dry pre-monsoon and a weak June.

1. 1.July 2026 forecast: below 94% of the 280.4 mm long-period average.
2. 2.June 2026 actual: 99.5 mm, roughly 40% below normal and the fifth-driest June since 1901.
3. 3.East and northeast India: 197.5 mm in June, the lowest June total recorded for the region since 1901.
4. 4.Central India: 84.4 mm in June, the region's seventh-driest June on record.

The regional picture inside that national figure is uneven rather than uniformly bad. Below-normal rainfall is expected across most of the country, but parts of northwest and northeast India, east-central India and the eastern peninsular region are forecast to receive normal to above-normal rain. A deficit spread thinly across the country and a deficit concentrated in one region do agricultural damage that looks identical in a national total and nothing like identical in a field.

The heat does not let up

The same advisory carried a second warning that matters for urban India. The IMD forecast above-normal maximum and minimum temperatures across most parts of the country through July, and advised precautions against heat and high humidity. The minimum temperature is the number most households actually feel at three in the morning, and it is the one that a below-normal rain forecast does nothing to relieve.

There was one piece of encouraging news in the same reporting cycle, and it concerned the immediate rather than the seasonal. A monsoon trough roughly 1,500 km long had formed, running from the northern Bay of Bengal to Jammu and Kashmir, and the IMD expected the monsoon to advance into north India between July 1 and July 4. A trough sitting close to the foothills delivers little rain where it lies and a great deal once it shifts south to its normal position.