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Seven decades of weather data show Chikkaballapur is becoming hotter, while rainfall is increasingly spilling beyond the traditional monsoon months.
Summers are starting earlier and ending later, disrupting crop calendars and increasing heat stress for farmers, livestock and horticultural crops.
Untimely rain, warmer nights and shifting seasons are driving crop losses, pest outbreaks and greater uncertainty for farming communities.
Researchers say long-term adaptation will require heat-resilient crops, better water management and stronger support for rural livelihoods.
Every season, Srileela (name changed) sows horse gram on her small plot in Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur, growing just enough to feed her family. And every season, she waits anxiously, hoping untimely rain will not destroy what little she has planted. There is no single dramatic weather event driving her worry. Instead, it is a climate that no longer behaves the way it used to.
We analysed seven decades (1951–2024) of India Meteorological Department (IMD) data and conducted focus group discussions with farmers, livestock rearers, women and young people across Chikkaballapur, confirming what Srileela already knows from experience. The district’s climate is undergoing a measurable, long-term shift that is rewriting the rules that farming has always followed.
The monsoon no longer knows its boundaries. The data show that annual rainfall in Chikkaballapur has increased significantly since the 1950s, and that the extra rain is not confined to the monsoon months (Figure 1a). March, April, May and November now receive significantly more rainfall than they did between 1951 and 1980, eating into the dry spells around which traditional crop calendars were built (Figure 1b). The onset of the monsoon itself has not shifted significantly. What has changed is everything around it: the line between the ‘rainy season’ and ‘the rest of the year’ is dissolving.
Heavy downpours have also become more frequent in September, as seen in the figure below, arriving just as chrysanthemum growers try to bring in their harvest. A single storm can wreck yields overnight.
At the same time, summer is colonising the calendar. Days above 35°C, the threshold used locally to define a ‘hot day’, are appearing earlier and more often. February, historically a cool month, recorded virtually no hot days before 2000, but recent years have seen as many as four. April has gone from fewer than 15 hot days in the 1950s to nearly the entire month recording temperatures above 35°C.
The first hot day of the year now arrives roughly two to three weeks earlier than it did in the early 1950s, while the last hot day occurs later, effectively stretching summer by about two weeks. Both days and nights are warming, by about 0.15-0.17°C and 0.07-0.09°C per decade, respectively. Warmer nights deny crops the overnight respite on which fruit quality and yields depend.
None of this shows up as a single dramatic event, which is exactly why it is so easy to miss. But the damage is just as real. Ayyappa, a horticulturist in the district, lost almost 22 tonnes of mangoes last season to sudden pre-monsoon showers. Tomato and mango flowering, which takes place between February and May, now falls squarely within this expanding heat window. Humid spells in once-dry months are encouraging pests and diseases, including thrips in tomatoes and fungal infections in mangoes. One tomato farmer with 50 acres lost ₹4 lakh in a single season and had to sell five acres of land to cope.
Hotter days do not simply mean greater discomfort. They narrow the window for land preparation, dry soils more quickly and increase water demand earlier in the season. These changes occur quietly, eroding yields and incomes over time. Livestock rearers face a similar predicament. Milk production drops each summer, heat stress causes miscarriages and deaths among pregnant animals, while prolonged rain brings udder infections and skin diseases.
And this is happening at the worst possible moment for Chikkaballapur district. Young people are leaving for the cities, taking labour away from a sector that badly needs it. The farmers who remain are surviving through what amounts to a cycle of risk, recovery and readjustment, propped up by short-term fixes: compensation payouts, seasonal migration and loans. None of these was designed to address a structural problem.
Heat is the most predictable part of Chikkaballapur’s future. Unlike rainfall, which remains erratic even as it increases, the warming trend is consistent enough to plan for heat- and disease-tolerant crop varieties and to shift planting calendars away from periods of peak stress. The district’s extra rainfall, currently a hazard because it arrives at the wrong time, could also become an asset. Farm ponds, better field drainage and drip irrigation could turn off-season rain into a more reliable water source for the high-value horticulture towards which farmers are already being pushed by the market.
But adaptation alone will not be enough if the underlying pressures on farmers go unaddressed. It is not only the weather that is driving people off the land. Chikkaballapur is trying to sustain agriculture with ageing farmers, a shrinking labour force and adaptation measures that, when they arrive at all, tend to come as short-term relief rather than long-term infrastructure. The district may well offer a glimpse of what lies ahead for dryland India more broadly, and the data already show that the shift is real.
Building climate resilience, therefore, may require more than new technologies and government schemes. It may depend on stronger collective institutions and markets that recognise the value of sustaining rural livelihoods and the cultures built around them.
Sukirti was a research associate at WELL Labs, a water systems transformation centre based in Bengaluru. Dina Zaman is a senior research associate at WELL Labs, a water systems transformation centre based in Bengaluru.
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth