New Delhi: India will experience above-normal monsoon rains this season on the back of favourable La Nina conditions, the IMD said on Monday, bringing cheer to farmers and policy-planners.

M Ravichandran, the secretary in the ministry of earth sciences, told a press conference that the seasonal rainfall will be on the higher side of ‘above-normal’, and pegged it at 106% of the long-period average (87 cm).

Parts of the country are already battling extreme heat.

A significantly high number of heatwave days are expected in the April to June period. This could strain power grids, and result in water shortages in several areas.

The monsoon is critical for India’s agricultural landscape, with 52% of the net cultivated area relying on it. It is also crucial for the replenishing reservoirs critical for drinking water apart from power generation across the country.

A prediction of above-normal rainfall during the monsoon season, therefore, comes as a huge relief to the fast-developing South Asian nation.

However, normal cumulative rainfall does not guarantee uniform temporal and spatial distribution of rain across the country, with climate change further increasing the variability of the rain-bearing system.

Parts of northwest, east and northeast India are expected to receive below-normal rainfall during the season, Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, the director general of the IMD, said during the presser.

However, models have not given any “clear signal” about monsoon rainfall for several parts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, which form the core monsoon zone (agriculture primarily rain-fed) of the country.