Before the monsoon clouds formed over the Arabian Sea, farmers like Nagaraj N in Karnataka’s Kolar district had already made their calculations, as Mongabay India reported. He sank another borewell to protect his mulberry and paddy fields, as groundwater levels in his village kept falling. With forecasts already hinting at a possible El Niño, he was not waiting to find out if they were right.
The World Meteorological Organization has placed an 82 per cent probability on El Niño developing between May and July 2026. El Niño is a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that recurs every few years and reshapes weather across the world; for India, its signature effect is a weakened monsoon. The US agency NOAA puts the chances at 96 per cent that conditions will persist into early 2027, while the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has already projected below-normal monsoon rainfall for the year, at around 92 per cent of the long-period average, the fifty-year benchmark against which each monsoon is measured. India is not short of warnings. What it is consistently short of is a response that reaches the people who need it most.
Agriculture contributes around 18 per cent of India’s GDP but employs nearly 47 per cent of its workforce. Of the cultivated area, roughly half remains entirely rain-fed. These lands depend on the southwest monsoon, which delivers 70 to 90 per cent of the country’s annual rainfall between June and September, and it is exactly this system that El Niño disrupts by suppressing the moisture-laden winds that sustain it.
When the rains are late or short, the kharif crops, sown in anticipation of the monsoon, are the first to go; rice, maize, soybean, and pulses. But the damage does not stay in the fields.
A short crop sets off a chain reaction, lifting food prices, cutting farm wages, shrinking rural demand, and pushing families towards debt and migration. A rainfall figure on a forecast becomes a livelihood crisis well beyond agriculture.
Food inflation was already running at 4.2 per cent in April 2026, and a deficient monsoon would push prices higher on pulses, cereals, and edible oils, hitting hardest the households least able to absorb the shock. India is the world’s largest producer of rice and the third largest of wheat. A domestic shortfall does not stay domestic.
The groundwater crisis deepens this exposure. India’s aquifers are already stressed from decades of extraction, and monsoon recharge depends on rain falling slowly and percolating over weeks. When rain comes in concentrated, storm-like bursts, more water pools on the surface and evaporates before it reaches the soil. Farmers who have already sunk their savings into borewells in response to previous failures now find those borewells chasing a falling water table.
El Niño does not produce a uniform drought. It lands hardest on people who were already carrying the most risk before it arrived.
Women make up 62.9 per cent of India’s agricultural workforce. Half work without pay. They own only 12.8 per cent of the land. When crops fail, they carry the physical consequences most directly, walking further for water and fodder. They absorb the labour burden of climate stress with almost no legal or financial claim to the resource they are managing.
Adivasi and Dalit farmers are more dependent on rain-fed cultivation, have smaller landholdings, and have far less access to formal credit and insurance. Among Scheduled Tribes, 70.7 per cent fall in the lowest wealth brackets, including poor housing and sanitation, which means the heat building outside is also building inside, overlapping disadvantages that make recovery harder and losses deeper.
When agriculture fails, households whose primary livelihood depends on farming fall back on the commons, shared resources such as village ponds, community forests, and grazing land. These have long acted as a buffer during droughts, allowing families to access water, fodder, and fuel when farm income collapses. But this safety net is shrinking. Encroachment, privatisation, and state acquisition have steadily reduced the area of shared land and water available for collective use.
As these commons erode, a failed monsoon is no longer a short-term setback; it becomes a more permanent form of vulnerability.
The 2023-24 El Niño contributed to the hottest year on record for India, with temperatures averaging 0.65°C above the 1991-2020 baseline. Delhi’s monitoring stations recorded temperatures as high as 49.1°C that summer. The Deccan Plateau, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and north Karnataka appear in IMD heatwave warnings so often that the warnings feel almost normalised. But the risk is anything but ordinary, especially for those who work outdoors. A single heatwave can cut agricultural productivity by as much as half, and agricultural workers, who make up a significant share of the workforce in these regions, face some of the highest exposure to extreme heat and are far more likely to die from occupational heat stress than workers in other sectors.
The government has taken steps. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana has been strengthened, contingency crop plans distributed, and fertiliser stocks secured. The IMD’s advance forecasts have given state governments and farmers months of lead time. But preparation at the top is not the same as resilience on the ground. The more durable answers have tended to come from the communities themselves.
In Marathwada, as Mongabay India has documented, women-led models run by organisations like Swayam Shikshan Prayog have rebuilt food security through prolonged drought by combining seed saving, crop diversification, and water conservation, an approach now replicated in Bihar and Kerala. Fishing communities in the Sundarbans have developed their own responses to shifting cyclone patterns. Adivasi communities in the Niyamgiri Hills have managed their forests sustainably for generations. The pattern is well established. Decades of research, including the Nobel Prize-winning work of economist Elinor Ostrom, show that communities given secure rights and real governance autonomy manage shared resources more sustainably than either the market or the state.
India does not have to look abroad for proof, though the proof abroad is striking. Between 2003 and 2009, the Andhra Pradesh Farmer Managed Groundwater Systems project trained farmers across 638 villages in seven drought-prone districts to measure their own water tables, calculate shared water budgets, and align cropping decisions to available water. The Food and Agriculture Organization recorded voluntary cuts in pumping and a shift toward less thirsty crops.
But the same project holds the warning that matters most for 2026, once the external funding stops, the water monitoring largely stops with it, and the benefits never fully reach the poorest farmers or women. The lesson is not that community management fails. It is that it fails when treated as a short-term project instead of a permanent public system.
Policy has not kept pace with what already works on the ground. Community institutions still struggle to access the financing meant to support them. Complex grant systems are designed for governments and large organisations, not for villages. CEEW’s 2025 district-level study already projected losses of 35 million full-time jobs and a 4.5 per cent GDP contraction by 2030 from heat stress alone, and this burden falls hardest on exactly the people least able to absorb it: outdoor and agricultural workers with little cushion against either heat or income loss.
District-level heat and water risk maps, of the kind CEEW has already built, could become a standard annual public tool rather than a one-off exercise. Community water budgeting could be funded as a continuing service rather than a project that dies with its grant. Climate finance could be restructured so that village institutions, not only state departments or large NGOs, can directly access it. And women, who do most of the farm labour and hold almost none of the land, could be granted legal recognition as cultivators, the precondition for reaching credit, insurance, and a voice in decisions.
None of this requires new technology. It requires a political decision about who the policy is designed to include.
El Niño does not choose who suffers. The terrain it falls on does, and India built that terrain: decades of policy that left the least land, the least water, and the least formal protection concentrated in the same hands.
The question is not whether El Niño is coming. It is whether the people and communities in Kolar, the Sundarbans, Marathwada and elsewhere will be treated as the centre of the response, or left once again to absorb the costs of a crisis that arrived with months of warning attached.
Gojesh Konsam is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal. Sukirti is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS)
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth