India's monsoon seen picking up after slow start

Seed Daily via AFP: India's crucial monsoon rains should pick up in July after a slow start over vast swathes of the country, which has threatened crops from rice to sugar, forecasters said.

Some 26 out of India's 36 weather zones received "deficient" or "scanty" rains in the past week from the monsoon which typically sweeps the subcontinent from June to September, according to the weather office's website on Saturday.

"The monsoon rains are expected to pick up in the latter half of next week," Swati Basu, acting Director General of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), told the semi-official news agency Press Trust of India late on Friday.

Basu forecast good rains in July which along with August are key months for planting and when India usually receives the maximum amount of rain.

For the past week, monsoon rains were 18 percent below average while for June as a whole they have been 23 percent below average -- fanning worried murmurs about a repeat of a drought that devastated Indian farmers in 2009.

"The monsoon has definitely started off on a sour note," economist Indranil Pan from the Indian investment house Kotak said in a note to clients....

The 2011 monsoon in south India, shot by Riyas.bca, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license