The Changing Monsoon and India’s Food Systems

The monsoon arrives every year. It always does. For most of India, it is not a season. It is a logic. The monsoons are the organising principle around which life and livelihoods are arranged, from crop calendars to marriages. That tenuous logic is now breaking down.

The broad direction of change is clear. India’s monsoon is not disappearing. In aggregate, rainfall may even be intensifying, with 2025 being the second consecutive year of above-normal totals. And yet the lived experience, for millions of farmers and communities, is one of increasing unpredictability, loss and damage. Aggregate numbers look fine, but the ground realities do not.

What is happening is not simply more or less rain. It is redistribution. The monsoon is shifting erratically, in shorter and sharper bursts, to places unaccustomed to receiving it, and away from places that need it. As extreme rainfall events increase, the dry spells within the monsoon season grow as well. Floods and droughts no longer belong to different years or different districts. 40% of India’s districts are exposed to alternating hazards of floods and droughts.

In 2025, extreme weather damaged crops across 17.4 million hectares, and for the third consecutive year, every state in India was hit. What has changed is not just the scale but the map of loss and damage. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka are among states that spent decades managing drought but now appear as regularly in flood damage data as Assam or Bihar. The monsoon is redistributing, and the loss is following it.

The future trajectory offers little comfort. Under warming scenarios, the Indian summer monsoon is projected to intensify overall but with sharply higher variability, later onset dates, shorter effective growing seasons, and more frequent extreme events. More rain. Less predictable.

What does this mean for food systems?

For farmers, timing of the rains is as critical as volume. Over 65% of India’s farmland is rainfed where farmers tend to grow crops built for dry conditions, not waterlogged ones. When farms flood, the crops that survived the drought cannot survive the deluge. A delayed onset disrupts sowing. An early withdrawal cuts the growing season short. Heavy downpours compact soil, cause waterlogging, and strip topsoil that takes decades to regenerate. 

The preparedness gap

Some things are improving. India’s forecasting infrastructure has taken a meaningful step forward. Mission Mausam, launched in 2024, is extending the weather forecast window and pushing village-level predictions out to ten days. India’s cyclone early warning systems are world class, and cyclone mortality has fallen dramatically as a result. These are real wins.

But the gaps are wide. Nearly two-thirds of India’s population is exposed to flood risk but only one-third of those in flood-prone regions are covered by any early warning system. The contrast with cyclone preparedness is stark, and it is costing lives. Crop insurance tells a similar story. Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) the government’s flagship scheme and the world’s largest by farmer enrolment, has a settlement problem. Less than half of the 56.80 crore applications enrolled since inception have received settlement claims. 

The deeper problem is this: India is building better tools to see the new monsoon. But its infrastructure, from crop calendars to insurance, drainage systems to water recharge, remains calibrated to the old one. 

The monsoon has always been an agent of life, abundance, and periodic destruction. What is new is the pattern. More intense, less predictable, redistributing across a landscape built for a different monsoon. India is beginning to watch it more carefully. Whether its farms, its people, and its institutions are being redesigned to live with it remains an open question. 

Written by  Edel Monteiro, Director of Program and Strategy, the India Climate Collaborative