Economists have a word for fraught global moments like the current one—polycrisis, when multiple shocks stop being separate problems and start feeding off one another. Into this tangle of wars and energy crises, the World Meteorological Organization has dropped a climate bombshell: there is an 80 percent chance a significant El Niño will take hold by mid-2026, with odds rising above 90 percent that it will persist well into winter. A few models go further, flagging a possible ‘super’ event—Pacific waters warming more than 2°C beyond normal. That has not happened since 2015-16.
For most countries, this would be a headline. For India, it is a livelihood emergency in waiting. Roughly 42 percent of India’s workforce earns their bread from farming, and the southwest monsoon accounts for 70 percent of the rain the country receives. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has already lowered its seasonal rainfall estimate twice. The probability of El Niño conditions prevailing through the June-September season now stands at 92 percent, with the phenomenon expected to gather muscle as the months go by.
Walk into any rain-dependent village in Vidarbha or Kalahandi and ask what a 70-mm shortfall in rainfall means. It means the kharif sowing gets delayed, then gambled upon, then sometimes abandoned. It means a family already spending half its income on food watches prices climb. It means the moneylender’s ledger grows thicker. Over 80 percent of Indian farmers work plots smaller than 2 hectares—patches that leave almost no room for error. Most have no canal or borewell to fall back on. When the monsoon stutters, their world stutters with it.
The physics behind the damage is straightforward, even if the consequences are not. El Niño warms the central Pacific, which in turn scrambles a vast atmospheric loop called the Walker Circulation. Normally, this loop helps pull moisture westward toward Asia. During an El Niño, it weakens. High pressure settles over the subcontinent, the humid updrafts that power the monsoon lose energy and rain-bearing systems thin out or stall. The IMD expects northwest, central and peninsular India to receive below-normal rainfall this year, with prolonged heat spells likely across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Gujarat. Past El Niño years—1987, 2002, 2009—are scars on India’s agrarian memory. Research published in Nature warns that these hot-and-dry monsoon seasons may become half again as frequent as the planet continues to warm.
Layer on the polycrisis and every pressure point gets worse. Higher crude means costlier diesel, costlier fertiliser, costlier transport—the three expenses a small farmer cannot avoid. If poor rains push up grain and vegetable prices at the same time that imported energy is stoking broader inflation, the squeeze falls hardest on those who can bear it least. The family in Marathwada or Bundelkhand is not tracking basis-point revisions to GDP forecasts. They are watching the sky and counting what is left in the grain bin.
What Jakarta and Lima figured
India is not alone in this predicament and there is no shame in looking outward. Indonesia’s rice belt faces eerily similar risks every time the Pacific warms. What Jakarta has done differently is invested in making climate science legible to the people who need it most. Through a programme called Climate Field Schools—run jointly by its meteorological agency and the agriculture ministry—Indonesian farmers learn to read seasonal forecasts and adjust their planting calendars before the drought bites. When a UN team reviewed the programme after the 2023 El Niño, they found it had tangibly softened the blow in the country’s most exposed communities. Indonesia has also rolled out a water-saving rice cultivation technique known as alternate wetting and drying (AWD), which trims irrigation needs by a fifth without hurting yields. Imagine what that could mean in the parched districts of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
South America tells a complementary story. Peru, sitting right on the Pacific’s doorstep, has long treated El Niño as a national economic emergency rather than a weather event. Its multi-sector Estudio Nacional del Fenómeno El Niño (ENFEN) commission brings meteorologists, agronomists, fisheries experts and finance officials around the same table. In 2023, that body sounded the alarm early enough for the anchovy fleet to be pulled off the water before stocks collapsed, and for coastal farmers to switch to heat-tolerant crop varieties ahead of the season. Across Latin America more broadly, governments are now building regional platforms that link climate forecasts directly to fertiliser supply chains, crop insurance products and emergency logistics. The lesson from both hemispheres is clear: resilience works when it escapes the meteorological silo and becomes everybody’s job.
From Delhi screens to Vidarbha fields
To be fair, India has not been sitting idle. In May 2026, IMD unveiled an AI-driven monsoon forecasting system that can predict onset at the block level a full month in advance—a leap from the district-level, week-ahead alerts of a decade ago. A pilot in Uttar Pradesh now generates rainfall predictions at one-kilometre resolution. Mission Mausam, a ₹2,000-crore push, fuses conventional weather models with machine-learning networks that can read monsoon patterns up to 18 days out. The AgriStack initiative has enrolled over 8.4 crore farmers into a digital identity system linked to land records, crops and entitlements, and a geospatial decision-support platform now overlays soil health, water availability and weather data onto a single screen.
Impressive on paper. But the test of any tool is whether it changes things for the person standing in a field with no smartphone signal and no English. Five things need to happen—fast. One, AI forecasts must reach smallholders in their own language, through village networks they already trust; digital IDs make targeting possible, but the advisory chain beyond the app is still broken. Two, borrowing from Indonesia’s AWD playbook, water management in rain-deficit districts needs to move from pilot to standard practice—micro-irrigation, watershed restoration, smarter use of groundwater. Three, crop insurance should follow the Latin American direction: parametric products that pay out automatically when a satellite detects low rainfall, no paperwork, no waiting. Four, ICAR’s drought-tolerant seed varieties must be in farmers’ hands before—not after—the sowing window. And five, taking a cue from Peru’s ENFEN, climate risk needs a permanent seat at the macroeconomic table—the Reserve Bank, the finance ministry and the agriculture ministry sharing a live feed connecting Pacific ocean temperatures to procurement policy and trade decisions.
The building blocks exist. The monsoon will almost certainly disappoint; the only uncertainty is by how much. What remains open is whether the woman tending a two-acre plot in Bundelkhand and the landless labourer waiting for harvest work in Kalahandi will experience this El Niño any differently than their parents experienced 2009. The distance between a climate dashboard glowing in a Delhi office and a cracked field in Vidarbha is not measured in kilometres. It is measured in political will, institutional speed and the stubborn last mile that technology alone cannot bridge. Closing that distance, before the Pacific peaks, is the test of Indian governance in 2026.
Sanjay K Srivastava | S Radhakrishnan Chair Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru; former Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction at UNESCAP
(Views are personal)