You’ve probably seen the image by now.

The monsoon stuck on the satellite map. Mumbai almost dry in the middle of June. Half your feed asking the same thing:

“Where is the rain?”

Most of us still file monsoon news under agriculture. Farmers worry, reservoirs fall, governments talk about drought relief, and the rest of us assume it is serious but not immediately personal.

Then the grocery bill…

Tomatoes get more expensive. Onions, dal, edible oil, milk, vegetables, all of it starts adding up in small ways. Not enough for you to notice on one visit, but enough for the monthly bill to feel different.

That is when the monsoon becomes a household budget problem.

Food and beverages make up 36.75% of India’s new CPI basket. So when weather hits food, it does not stay inside the farm economy. It enters the number India uses to measure everyday inflation.

And prices do not wait for anyone to officially declare a bad monsoon.

Food inflation rose to 4.78% in May, up from 4.20% in April. CRISIL’s Roti Rice Rate report put tomato prices 57% higher year-on-year in May, mainly because of lower production, lower acreage and adverse weather.

A study on climate-related food inflation found that rainfall shocks can add about 1.24 percentage points to vegetable inflation, while temperature shocks can add about 1.30 points.

This year has both risks sitting on top of each other.

So even before the monsoon has properly failed, the market has already started pricing in the possibility that it might.

None of this came without notice.

By the end of May, IMD had said June rainfall was likely to be below normal, at less than 92% of the long-period average.

The monsoon reached Kerala three days late, on June 4, and then slowed down. Between June 4 and June 15, India received 19.2 mm of rainfall against a normal of 53.7 mm, a 64% deficit.

The forecast was clear enough. The problem is what it was warning us about.

A weak monsoon is not just a one-season shock in India, because so much of the food system still depends on rain arriving at the right time and in the right places.

About 51% of India’s net sown area is still rainfed, and rainfed agriculture accounts for nearly 40% of total food production.

This has improved over the years, but not enough to make a bad monsoon feel like a manageable inconvenience.

So when the rain stalls, the country is not just waiting for better weather. It is waiting on a system that was supposed to have more backup by now.

The real protection was never going to come from one June meeting.

It was supposed to come from the work done years earlier: more assured irrigation, better water storage, and less dependence on one good monsoon.

That is where the gap still is.

The Agriculture Ministry says about 51% of India’s net sown area is rainfed, and rainfed agriculture still accounts for nearly 40% of total food production. In 2025, the ministry told Parliament that 44.2% of India’s gross cropped area was still un-irrigated in 2022-23.

And the irrigation work that was meant to reduce this dependence has not exactly been smooth.

And yes, there is action now. The Centre is asking states to revise contingency plans, keep seed buffers ready and prepare alternate crop advice. 

Many of these district plans were at least 10 years old, and the revised versions were expected only after El Niño had already been declared.

The backup was supposed to be ready before the bad forecast!

Now the temporary plan is carrying the weight of the permanent work we kept delaying.

And that delay will eventually shows up in food prices.

There is a reason this keeps happening, and it is not just a government problem.

People are bad at acting on slow warnings.

Disaster researchers have found that people often do not act on threat information until they feel personally at risk. 

Otherwise, life continues.

You see the monsoon map and think, bad year maybe.

You read about El Niño and scroll past.

You hear that tomatoes may get expensive and think, they always say this before monsoon.

And then three weeks later, the same reflects in your bill.

That is when it finally feels real.

The mind has seen rain arrive every June for years. It cannot easily believe in the June when it may not. A forecast has to fight memory, and memory usually wins.

That is true at home too.

A family does not change its budget until the monthly expense crosses a number. A company does not fix hiring until the wrong people have already been hired. A person does not take health seriously until the report looks bad enough to scare them.

The warning is usually visible much earlier.

It just does not feel expensive yet.

Now, to be fair, nothing is sealed yet.

The rain can still recover. Reservoir levels are not terrible. India’s 166 major reservoirs were at 28.28% of capacity, which is above the normal level for this time of year, even if lower than last year.

So no, this is not a panic note.

But… If we prepare and the rain turns out fine, very little is lost. If we do not prepare and the rain does not recover, we will pay for months.

That is the whole point.

The hard part is doing something while the problem still looks manageable. That is the part we keep postponing.

So let me ask you what I keep asking myself.

When a warning shows up early, do you do anything with it? Or does it become one more thing you scroll past, until it turns into a bill you were warned about months ago?

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. The tricky thing about a slow problem is that it never feels urgent on any given day. The rain not falling today looks a lot like the rain that did not fall yesterday. By the time it becomes obvious, it’s at times a little too late.