The Maharashtra government has declared drought in 265 talukas across the state, after one of the driest monsoons in years has left standing crops wilted in the fields and farmers staring at a season of mounting losses.
A government resolution dated September 25, 2026, issued by the state’s Relief and Rehabilitation Department, said that drought conditions had been identified in the 265 talukas on the basis of rainfall deficit and other factors since June. District collectors have been directed to immediately begin field assessments of crop damage, including panchnamas, photographs showing the condition of crops in the surveyed areas, and GPS-tagged records, and submit reports to the government.
The declaration spans large parts of Marathwada and Vidarbha, the two regions that have long been at the centre of the country’s deepest agrarian distress, through recurring droughts and farmer suicides, alongside drought-hit pockets of northern and western Maharashtra.
Among the districts covered by the declaration are Latur, Beed, Dharashiv, Nanded, Parbhani and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in Marathwada, and Yavatmal, Amravati, Akola, Wardha, Nagpur and Chandrapur in Vidarbha.
Yavatmal has 16 affected talukas under the declaration, the highest for any district, followed by Jalgaon with 15, while Nanded, Amravati and Nagpur have 14 each. Buldhana has 13 talukas under the declaration and Chandrapur 12, underscoring the wide geographical spread of the drought across the state.
The declaration came days after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis toured drought-hit parts of Latur, Dharashiv and Solapur and assessed that soybean, maize and cotton were among the worst-affected crops.
In Marathwada alone, agriculture department officials have estimated that at least a quarter of standing crops were damaged after a dry spell stretching for about 45 days, according to news reports.
Maharashtra becomes the second state after Karnataka to declare drought. Karnataka began declaring drought-hit taluks in late August, and by September 22, it had declared 177 of its 240 taluks drought-affected after successive rounds of assessment, as deficient rainfall and crop losses spread across the state.
More than half of the country, or around 51.2 per cent of India’s land area was under dry or drought conditions as of September 23, according to IIT Gandhinagar’s India Drought Monitor.
Maharashtra was among the worst affected, 84.1 per cent of its area was under dry or drought conditions, even as El Niño continued to strengthen in the tropical Pacific. The World Meteorological Organization has said the event is firmly established and expected to persist through February 2027.
The state government has announced a package of relief measures for the affected talukas, including concessions in land revenue, restructuring of crop loans, suspension of recovery of agriculture-related loans, concessions on electricity bills for agricultural pumps, waiver of examination fees for school and college students, and expansion of works under the Employment Guarantee Scheme.
In villages officially facing water scarcity, electricity connections to agricultural pumps are also not to be disconnected.
The government resolution (GR) also provides for drinking-water supply through tankers where required, fodder arrangements for livestock and the initiation of water-conservation works.
However, direct compensation for crop losses has not yet been announced. The resolution says assistance to drought-affected farmers will be declared separately after completion of the prescribed assessment process, making the ongoing field surveys and panchnamas critical to determining the scale of losses and the relief that will follow.
According to a PTI report, Deputy Chief Minister Sunetra Pawar said that the actual assistance to farmers will be decided after the ground-level assessment.
The GR also says that the 265 talukas are currently under Trigger-1, or the first stage of the drought assessment process, applied on the basis of rainfall deficit and other prescribed indicators.
Rainfall data by India Meteorological Department (IMD) shows how uneven and severe this season’s shortfall has been. Maharashtra’s overall monsoon deficit for June 1 to September 25 stood at close to 18 per cent.
But at the district level, the picture was much starker: 20 out of 36 districts have recorded deficit rainfall during this period.
The worst shortfalls were concentrated in some of the state’s major farming districts. Solapur recorded a rainfall deficit of 57 per cent, followed by Beed at 49 per cent, Hingoli at 48 per cent, Jalna at 46 per cent, Dharashiv at 45 per cent, and Akola at 41 per cent.
The figures showed that the stress has been particularly acute across Marathwada, where several districts have received barely half to a little over half of their normal monsoon rainfall, while parts of Vidarbha and western Maharashtra have also seen huge deficits.
The prolonged gaps between rain spells have compounded the cumulative shortfall, leaving rain-fed crops especially vulnerable during critical stages of growth. Scientists have warned that it is not just the cumulative rainfall deficit but the long breaks between rain spells that have intensified the agricultural drought.
Karthikeyan Lanka, associate professor at IIT Bombay’s Centre for Climate Studies, had earlier told Down To Earth that this monsoon was marked by repeated swings between wet and dry conditions rather than sustained rainfall. Heavy or sporadic rain could temporarily wet the soil, but prolonged dry periods that followed allowed moisture to be lost again through evaporation and plant transpiration.