Water, crops, food stocks and village demand

The Rural and agriculture dimension asks how India’s farms and villages are doing. It reads the weekly reservoir and sowing bulletins, IMD’s district rainfall, the monthly fertiliser and foodgrain bulletins, and, from other steps, vehicle registrations and rural prices. It makes no crop forecast.

Code: compute/economy_rural.py, publish/economy_rural.py, steps/economy_rural.py; stocking norms in compute/economy_rural_stocking_norms.csv. Step economy_rural follows economy_households and economy_prices, and runs in the morning and weekly tiers only. Bundles: economy/rural/facts, reservoirs, reservoir_regions, sowing_progress, sowing_crops, fertiliser, stocks, stocks_quarters, stocks_states, demand. Tests: pipeline/tests/test_economy_rural.py. Pages: /economy/rural/ and its water, crops and grain-stocks pages.

Inputs

All are Government of India publications, used with attribution. Four are laptop-owned in the Data bank (their hosts refuse GitHub’s runners or keep only recent files) and reach the cloud through R2.

• cwwg_reservoirs: the Central Water Commission’s weekly bulletin of live storage in the major reservoirs, as tabled by the Crop Weather Watch Group, from January 2023. For All India and each region (the bulletin’s own subtotal rows): live capacity, storage now, a year earlier and the normal (the average of the last ten years for the same week), in billion cubic metres.
• cwwg_crop_sowing: the weekly area sown by crop in each season (kharif, rabi, summer) against the same week a year earlier and the season’s normal area, from July 2023, in lakh hectares.
• imd_rainfall_distribution: IMD’s daily table of rainfall against normal for every district and meteorological subdivision, for the day and for the season to date. IMD keeps no archive, so the history starts on the first day Tipsheet captured it; the page says so.
• dfpd_foodgrain_bulletin: the Department of Food and Public Distribution’s monthly bulletin, central pool stocks of wheat and milled rice by state (closing balance at month-end), from 2019. Older bulletins in layouts not yet read leave gaps.
• dof_fertiliser_sales: the Department of Fertilizers’ monthly bulletin, all-India sales and requirement of urea, DAP, MOP and NPK complexes, from January 2024, in lakh tonnes. A month’s bulletin counts from the end of the following month.
• Stocking norms: DFPD’s foodgrain stocking norms (operational stock plus strategic reserve) for the first day of each quarter, read from the bulletin’s own stock page (June 2026, page 11) and kept in economy_rural_stocking_norms.csv: 1 April 210.4 lakh tonnes, 1 July 411.2, 1 October 307.7, 1 January 214.1.
• From other steps: tractor and two-wheeler registrations (VAHAN, growth on a year earlier, economy_households_monthly) and rural, urban and rural-food CPI inflation (economy_prices_monthly).

Measures

• Storage against normal: storage now ÷ normal storage − 1, and the same against a year earlier, for All India each week and for each region in the latest week. Shares of capacity are the bulletin’s own. CWC’s list of monitored reservoirs has grown (143 in January 2023, 178 in October 2026); each bulletin’s normal and year-earlier figures are for that bulletin’s list, so each week’s comparison is like for like, while comparisons across weeks span slightly different lists. The page counts the weeks it ranks against and names when they begin.
• Rainfall: the number of districts and subdivisions in each IMD category for the season to date on the latest captured day. IMD’s categories are departures from normal: large excess 60% or more, excess 20 to 59%, normal −19 to 19%, deficient −20 to −59%, large deficient −60 to −99%, no rain −100%.
• Sowing: each season’s latest bulletin, by crop group, against a year earlier and as a share of the normal area. The charts feature the latest season once a tenth of its normal area is sown, and otherwise the most recent other season, whose sowing is complete; the words describe both.
• Fertiliser: monthly sales by product and in total, growth on the same month a year earlier (from January 2025, a year after the series starts), and sales against the month’s requirement.
• Stocks: the month-end closing balance is the stock on the first of the next month. On 1 April, 1 July, 1 October and 1 January, wheat, rice and their total are divided by that date’s norm. States are ranked by the latest total.

The answer and the scorecard

The headline is mechanical: reservoirs are “low” when storage is more than 10% below normal, and grain stores “full” when the central pool holds more than one and a half times the norm on the latest quarter date. These are editorial rules, not fitted thresholds. The scorecard places six readings against their own history (economy_common.history_place): storage against normal, central pool stocks, urea sales growth, tractor and two-wheeler registration growth, and rural inflation. Several histories are short (reservoirs from 2023, fertiliser from 2024), and the scorecard marks them.

What the numbers cannot tell

Reservoirs are not groundwater, which irrigates much of India. Area sown is not output. Rice stocks leave out unmilled paddy. Stocks far above the norm cost money to hold and say nothing about this year’s harvest. Registrations count vehicles by where they are registered, not where they are used.