NEW DELHI: Flood fury in different parts of the country has dominated the news this rainy season as India experienced its wettest monsoon in 25 years . However, amid all the rain, 154 districts in the country — more than one in every five for which data is available — received deficient or scanty rainfall in the season.These dry districts account for nearly 23% of the 678 districts for which India Meteorological Department ’s rainfall data is available. All but 12 of these districts are in north, east and northeast India.IMD defines “deficient” rainfall in a district as rainfall that is 20% to 59% below normal. Deficiency of 60% or more falls in the “scanty” or “large deficient” category.Haryana had the highest number of dry districts, 19 out of 21, including three where rainfall was scanty. The overall monsoon deficiency in Haryana was 42%, which made it the driest state in the country in the season after Manipur (-56%). Delhi had five dry districts out of six for which data was available.In fact, more than a third of the dry districts, 52, are in the high-output agriculture belt of Punjab, Haryana and west Uttar Pradesh , including Delhi. This is the region where the water table is falling alarmingly, and another season of poor rains will only add to the stress.The high number of dry districts during a season when countrywide rainfall was 10% above normal may come as a surprise to many but not to experts familiar with the vagaries of the monsoon.“During a normal monsoon year, around 30% of the districts in the country get deficient or scanty rainfall. This year, due to higher rainfall, that figure is closer to 20%. India is a vast country and there is much variation in rainfall at the district level,” said Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, IMD’s director general of meteorology.Last year, when the monsoon was more than 9% below normal — close to the threshold of a drought year — there were 254 dry districts across the country. These accounted for nearly 38% of all districts. This year’s number is 40% lower while rainfall was 20% higher than in 2018.“Rainfall distribution was good this year although temporally, the distribution wasn’t good in east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These sub divisions got heavy rainfall in the second half of September after being deficient for most of the season,” said Mohapatra.Outside of the rain-deficient districts, and the havoc caused by heavy rains, this year’s monsoon should bring good news, particularly for upcoming sowing of rabi crops. At least five states — Odisha , Madhya Pradesh , Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala —had no dry districts at the end of the monsoon season.Across south India, there were just four districts that ended with deficient rainfall. In central India, that number stood at eight. Surprisingly, five of these districts were in Maharashtra, which was among the top four wettest states during the season and witnessed floods in some part or the other in July, August and September.District wise analysis reveals important information about distribution of rainfall that often gets obscured in big-picture data. For instance, at the sub-divisional level, just five of the 36 sub divisions in the country — less than 14% — got deficient rainfall this monsoon. That number comes further down to four out of 36 states and UTs that were rain-deficient.