Every June, India holds its breath for the same event: the southwest monsoon making landfall in Kerala. This year, that wait carried more weight than usual. The 2026 monsoon arrived under the shadow of a strengthening El Niño, and within weeks, the season’s early signals had moved from cautious watchfulness to genuine concern across farms, reservoirs and policy desks alike.

A Pacific Warming, A National Risk

El Niño is a periodic warming of sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, part of a recurring climate pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It does not directly touch Indian soil, yet few climate phenomena influence the country’s fortunes as profoundly. By altering wind and pressure patterns across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, El Niño tends to weaken the very winds that usually carry moisture toward the Indian subcontinent.

In June 2026, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that El Niño conditions were underway, with forecasters flagging a real possibility that it could intensify into a ‘super’ event, marked by sea-surface temperature anomalies exceeding two degrees Celsius. The India Meteorological Department, drawing on this signal alongside other regional indicators, projected the southwest monsoon at around 90 to 92 percent of the long-period average for the season, placing 2026 firmly in below-normal territory. By mid-to-late June, several independent rainfall monitors had already recorded shortfalls running as high as 40 percent or more in parts of the country.

Why a Few Percentage Points Matter So Much

To someone outside agriculture, a forecast of 90 percent of average rainfall might not sound alarming. But India’s relationship with the monsoon is unlike that of most large economies. The four-month season delivers somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the country’s entire annual rainfall, and it irrigates land that machinery and canals cannot reach. Close to half of India’s cultivated area remains entirely rainfed, dependent on nothing but the sky. An estimated 60 percent of the country’s farmers have no other meaningful source of water for their kharif crops, the rice, soybean, cotton, pulses and groundnut sown in anticipation of the rains.

When the monsoon is delayed or deficient, the damage moves through the system in a predictable but painful sequence. Sowing windows shorten, forcing farmers to choose between waiting for rain that may not come and planting into dry soil. Where groundwater is available, farmers turn to diesel and electric pumps to compensate, and input costs climb even as yields fall. The result is a familiar pattern in El Niño years: lower output and higher costs arriving together. Data compiled by ICRIER going back to 1951 shows that in eleven of fifteen moderate-to-severe El Niño years, India’s agricultural output contracted, with monsoon rainfall falling by an average of 9.7 percent and kharif foodgrain production dropping by roughly 5.7 percent in those years.

Beyond the Farm Gate

The 2026 season has made clear that this is not only a rural story. The Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has flagged more than 300 districts as vulnerable to rainfall shortfalls this year, including over 100 high-priority districts where irrigation cover is especially thin. States repeatedly named in these assessments include Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and parts of Uttar Pradesh.

Water stress has also reached India’s cities. Reservoir data tracked through April and May 2026 showed storage across the country’s monitored dams falling from roughly 39 percent of total capacity to under 35 percent within just two weeks, a drop of around eight billion cubic metres. Mumbai’s situation drew particular attention: by mid-June, the reservoirs supplying the city were reported at just over 10 percent of capacity, leaving roughly 13 million residents with an estimated forty days of stored drinking water. Food inflation, already running at over 4 percent in April 2026, is widely expected to climb further on pulses, cereals and edible oils if the rainfall deficit persists through the remainder of the season, a burden that falls hardest on households with the least room to absorb higher prices.

A Crisis With a Track Record, Not a Surprise

None of this is unprecedented. The 2015-16 ‘super’ El Niño remains the most-cited recent benchmark: that season delivered just 86 percent of average rainfall, and agricultural growth slowed to a mere 0.5 percent. What makes 2026 worth watching closely is that the warning signs arrived early and the scale of vulnerability, measured in districts, reservoirs and rural incomes, is unusually well documented. Officials at the Ministry of Agriculture have been candid that the country’s district-level contingency plans, some of them a decade old, were not built with a season like this one in mind.

That gap between the scale of the risk and the age of the response plans is, in many ways, the real story behind the headlines. The monsoon will keep arriving every June, and Pacific Ocean temperatures will keep cycling through their own rhythm regardless of policy choices made in New Delhi. What India can still influence is how prepared its districts, its farmers and its water systems are for the years when that rhythm turns against it. That question, of preparedness rather than prediction, is where attention now needs to shift.