Across the country, farmers have started preparing their paddy fields, but the rain they need is running behind schedule. The monsoon, which usually reaches Nepal around June 13, is already three days late this year, and meteorologists at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology say developing El Niño conditions in the Pacific could hold it back further still. They are not yet ready to say how long the wait might stretch, but the early signs point to a later-than-normal onset.
There is some comfort in the present. Pre-monsoon activity has picked up, and isolated showers are already falling across the hills of Koshi, Bagmati and Gandaki, along with parts of the Tarai in Madhesh and Lumbini. Atmospheric conditions are slowly turning favourable, and forecasters expect a clearer picture within a few days. A late monsoon is also not unprecedented. In several past years the rains arrived only between June 21 and June 24, so this year’s delay sits within Nepal’s long record of variability rather than far outside it.
What worries forecasters is the bigger climate signal behind the delay. An El Niño event, marked by unusually warm sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, has already formed and is strengthening. Because the monsoon that feeds Nepal travels up through the Bay of Bengal, El Niño can weaken the atmospheric systems that carry moisture into the region, which tends to reduce or postpone rainfall across South Asia. Nepal’s historical data backs this up, with delayed onsets recorded in earlier El Niño years such as 1982, 1987, 1997, 2015 and 2023. Officials stress that the system is still moving from a neutral phase toward El Niño rather than peaking, and that rainfall is shaped by many forces beyond this single one.
The stakes are higher than a simple calendar quibble. Paddy is Nepal’s staple crop and the backbone of rural livelihoods, and transplantation is acutely sensitive to the timing and strength of the early monsoon. A rain shortfall at the wrong moment can shrink yields, push up food prices and deepen the import bill, pressures the country can ill afford given an already widening trade deficit and uneven growth. The World Food Programme has separately flagged this year’s delayed and below-average monsoon onset as a food security concern it is watching closely. For a farming economy that still runs largely on the sky’s schedule, a weaker or later monsoon is not just a weather story. It is a development story, touching incomes, nutrition and the household budgets of millions who plant now and hope the rain follows.