India faces growing drought risk as monsoon progress slows

The monsoon reached India and then lost momentum. The share of the country that is abnormally dry or in drought has climbed back to about a quarter, with Maharashtra and the north-east worst hit.

India's monsoon arrived and then stalled. The country's dry belt is spreading.

On June 17, the share of India that was abnormally dry or in drought jumped to about 24.8 per cent, up 6.3 points in seven days, and well above the 15.2 per cent a year earlier, according to the India Drought Monitor. The driest belt runs through the western Deccan and the Northeast, where the soil has yet to recover from a slow, patchy start to the rains.

Maharashtra alone has 61.7 per cent of its area abnormally dry or in drought. It is still a long way from late 2023, when nearly half the country was parched. But for now, the rains are feeding the dry patch's spread — not clearing it.

Drought in India rarely makes the front page until crops wilt or taps run dry. Yet a weekly index that blends rainfall, river flow, and soil moisture shows the country has spent much of the past three years with a fifth or more of its land short of water.

WHAT THE MAP SHOWS

Roughly 14 per cent of the country was in drought proper (moderate or more severe) on June 17. Nearly five per cent sat in the three harshest bands: severe, extreme, and exceptional.

These are not raw rainfall numbers. The index reads the consequences of dry weather: how low the soil moisture has fallen and how thin the rivers have run, not just how many millimetres of rain were missed. That is why land can stay flagged as dry for weeks after a shower passes through. The ground and the streams take time to refill.

MAHARASHTRA, THE DRIEST OF THE BIG STATES

No big state is drier than Maharashtra. About 61.7 per cent of it was abnormally dry or in drought on June 17, the highest share among India's large states, behind only smaller northeastern states such as Manipur and Meghalaya.

The harshest bands cluster in the state's south-west: Satara reads extreme drought, and Ratnagiri sits on the severe-to-extreme line, with Sangli, Solapur, and the Konkan coast close behind in severe drought. A thin pre-monsoon and a stalled June have left the Deccan's soils and reservoirs short just as the kharif sowing window opens.

• Satara — the worst in the state: all of it in drought, all of it severe or worse, with pockets of exceptional drought.
• Ratnagiri — entirely in drought, four-fifths of it severe or worse.
• Sangli — about 83 per cent in drought, most of it severe.
• Solapur — about 95 per cent in drought, half of it severe or worse.

Along the Konkan coast, Sindhudurg, Raigad, Thane, and Palghar are almost fully dry, mostly in the moderate-to-severe range. Kolhapur is the opposite case — only about 61 per cent of it is in drought, but more than half of that is severe or worse.

THE LONGER VIEW

A single week can mislead. The more honest measure is how the dry area has moved over time.

The trend chart tells a story the map cannot. Across the past three years, the dry share has swung between roughly a tenth and a half of the country. It reached its highest point, about 48 per cent, in the first week of November 2023, during a weak monsoon year. It has come down since, helped by better rains in 2024 and 2025. This June's reading, near a quarter, sits in the middle of that range, neither a crisis nor an all-clear.

The complication is timing. The monsoon reached Kerala on June 4, a few days later than usual, then lost momentum. From June 1 to 21, rainfall across much of India ran about a third below normal, according to gridded data from the India Meteorological Department. Rain that does not fall cannot refill soil, so the drought index has been slow to respond, even though the season has technically begun.

A lag is also built into the measure. Soil moisture and river flow react days to weeks after the rain, not the same afternoon. So a burst of monsoon rain in late June would show up in the drought map only later in July. For now, the map is still reading the dryness of the weeks before the rains arrived.

EL NINO

Behind the stalled monsoon sits a familiar influence in the Pacific. Sea-surface temperatures across the equatorial tropical Pacific have warmed sharply through 2026, and the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has an El Nino advisory in effect, a pattern associated with weaker Indian monsoons. The IMD, citing a high chance of El Nino developing over the season, has forecast a below-normal monsoon this year.

An El Nino does not seal the monsoon's fate; some El Nino years have delivered near-normal rains. But it tilts the odds toward a weaker season, and a weaker season is what would keep central India's dry belt from clearing.

THE CONSEQUENCES

This is the window when the country sows its main kharif crops, and that sowing follows the rain. A dry Maharashtra and central India in late June raises the risk of delayed planting in a belt that grows much of the nation's soybean, pulses and cotton. Reservoir levels and summer drinking-water supply ride on the same rains.

The IMD has forecast a below-normal monsoon for 2026, at 90 per cent of the long-period average, with a 60 per cent chance of a deficient season in its May 29 revision. That is why the next few weeks of the trend line are worth watching closely.

The risk is serious enough that the state's agricultural establishment has already moved. An Anticipatory Action and Response Plan for Maharashtra, drawn up before the kharif season by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, with government partners including the IMD and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, warns that an El Nino-driven below-normal monsoon could hit the state's farming hardest.

It flags 181 of Maharashtra's 353 agricultural blocks as highly vulnerable to drought, names cotton, maize, and soybean as the most at-risk crops. The plan expects peak impact in August and September and urges farmers to switch to hardier millets and pulses and to prepare protective irrigation.

That preparation is already reaching the field. With the rains delayed, Maharashtra now expects kharif sowing across about 145 lakh hectares this season, down from 157 lakh hectares a year ago, and its agriculture department has issued 10 advisories in two months urging farmers to wait for adequate soil moisture before they sow, according to the Indian Express. State agricultural universities have warned cotton and soybean growers not to sow past the third week of July, and to raise seed rates and trim cotton acreage if the monsoon slips further.

If the monsoon revives, the quarter should shrink through July as soils recharge. If it keeps stalling, the dry belt could deepen from "abnormally dry" into genuine drought just as crops need water most.

Year after year, some parts of India have stayed dry, and in 2026, the season that is supposed to end the drought is instead letting it spread. The monsoon has arrived and then stalled over the very states that need it most, leaving about a quarter of the country dry in the week its fields go in. Whether that quarter recedes or hardens now turns on the one thing none of these maps can yet show: rain that has not yet fallen.

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