When the monsoon arrives three weeks late, what happens to the crop that was supposed to go in with it?
Data year: 2026 (weekly, current season) · Source: DA&FW weekly area coverage · Updated: Weekly during the kharif and rabi seasonsIn preparation
When the monsoon arrives three weeks late, what happens to the crop that was supposed to go in with it?
Kharif is India's monsoon crop — rice, pulses, millets, oilseeds, cotton — and it is sown to the rain rather than the calendar. The Ministry of Agriculture publishes area sown every week, which makes it one of the few Indian datasets that tells you what is happening now rather than what happened last year.
In 2026 the season opened 21% behind. By 24 July the gap had closed to 4.7%, but not evenly: millets and pulses carry most of the remaining shortfall, and a crop sown in late July has fewer days before the monsoon withdraws. Area sown is not area harvested.
These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.
| Indicator | Unit | Source and year |
|---|---|---|
| Kharif area sown, all-India | lakh hectares | DA&FW weekly area coverageData year: 2026 (weekly, current season) |
| Area against same week last year | lakh hectares, change | DA&FW weekly area coverageData year: 2026 (weekly, current season) |
| Share of normal season area | % | DA&FW, 2020-21 to 2024-25 averageData year: 2020-21 to 2024-25 (five-year normal) |
| Area by crop group | lakh hectares | DA&FW weekly area coverageData year: 2026 (weekly, current season) |
A crop-group dashboard with sub-crop detail and a week-by-week catch-up chart. Live now.
The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.
Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.
Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.
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