El Niño brings drought declaration into sharper focus

- India’s 2016 drought manual uses a multi-step, multi-indicator process to declare droughts, but inconsistent implementation, staffing gaps, and regional differences mean many drought-hit areas go undetected or undeclared. - Past El Niño years, such as 1991-92 and 2015-16, cut India’s agricultural output by 5 to 7%. This year, 315 districts are flagged as vulnerable. - Declaring drought can be a politically contentious process. Research shows that misdirected relief can benefit ruling state parties electorally. Despite government assurances of adequate preparations, the looming El Niño has cast an uncertain shadow over crop productivity in India. So far, there has been a rainfall deficit of 14% over the country since the beginning of the monsoon season, according to the Crop Weather Watch Group under the Department of Agriculture. The El Niño is expected to gain strength over the second half of the monsoon season (August-September), the India Meteorological Department confirmed. The latest kharif crop sown area report shows a reduction of 13 lakh (1.3 million) hectares in the sown area of paddy, the dominant kharif crop, compared to last year. In anticipation of the El Niño’s impacts, the Indian Council on Agricultural Research (ICAR) put out an advisory instructing district-level farming research centres – Krishi Vigyan Kendras — to act opportunistically, distributing climate resilient seeds, disseminating advisories, and providing resources on fodder conservation. Even so, drought conditions have led to vocal demands for relief from several parts of the country, including Gujarat and Karnataka, putting the spotlight on the gaps between drought preparedness, detection and declaration. According to the India Drought Monitor, a tool developed by researchers from the Water and Climate Lab at IIT Gandhinagar, nearly 40% of the country is facing abnormal, moderate, or severe levels of dryness as of August 24, based on select hydrometeorological indicators alone. How droughts are declared India’s drought declaration process is dictated by the 2016 Manual for Drought Management, drafted by the Department of Agriculture under the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW). The Manual was revised as a result of a landmark case filed in the Supreme Court by the political organisation Swaraj Abhiyan in 2015. The petition was instrumental in presenting drought as a slow-onset disaster whose impacts went beyond deficiencies in rainfall. It argued that prevailing protocols failed to recognise drought at the sub-divisional level, and that as a result, existing schemes and relief measures were often ineffectively targeted. “A rainfall deficiency may indicate meteorological drought, but an agricultural drought depends on factors like soil moisture levels, crop patterns, irrigation and other local conditions,” explained Araypalli Sivasenareddy, an advisor with the central government’s Development and Knowledge Sharing Initiative (DAKSHIN), an initiative focussed on Global South cooperation. “This is why a multi-indicator based assessment is a much better approach.” The court issued its order in May 2016 and directed the central government to create a more detailed protocol for drought declaration. As per the updated manual, drought is measured through indices covering rainfall, vegetation cover (via remote sensing), local hydrology (reservoir storage, groundwater, streamflow), cropping patterns (area sown, soil moisture), and other factors like fodder availability and outmigration levels. For the kharif crop, the declaration process follows three steps. The first step is triggered when a deviation in rainfall levels is established using a combination of indicators like the standardised precipitation index, the occurrence of dry spells (a period of 3-4 weeks with no or little rainfall), or a marked deficiency in rainfall. In the event that the first step is triggered, authorities must assess impacts across an additional three indicators (such as hydrology, soil moisture levels, vegetation, and cropping patterns). A drought is considered severe when at least two of the three selected indicators cross the “severe” threshold and the third is “moderate.” A moderate drought is when two of the three impact indicators are in the “moderate” category. After the second step is triggered, the final step involves ground truthing, where states conduct a sample survey to make a final determination of drought severity. Once states notify the drought, and if they want additional financial assistance from the central government, an Inter-Ministerial Central Team is dispatched to verify the state’s claims. For the rabi season, the triggers are modified based on the crop’s water source, since these crops are not necessarily rainfed. Even when drought is declared, challenges in implementation can persist. In Karnataka’s Bagalkot district for example, where five taluks are declared to be under severe drought, joint director of Agriculture, T.S. Rudreshappa, told Mongabay India that lack of staff was a hindrance in implementing the KVK’s contingency plan. “We only have two to three officers per cluster of panchayats, so visiting the field, educating farmers, and distributing the inputs like seeds and fertilisers is difficult,” he said. To prepare for the El Niño, the district encouraged replacing maize cultivation with green gram, black gram, and red gram. Issues with the drought declaration process Though the 2016 drought manual was revised to include a broader set of indicators, following each of the steps involved requires extensive inter-departmental cooperation that states may lack. “If one mandal or taluk is identified as having drought, there are times when the neighbouring taluk, despite having the same underlying conditions, is not,” said Reddy, adding that this could be because of social and political pressures, but also because of lack of coordination and human resources on the ground. An analysis of drought detection and declaration using the 2016 framework found that droughts in central India were more likely to be both detected and declared than in states like Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. These differences suggest the framework needs to “be designed separately to account for regional differences,” says the research, conducted by researchers from IIT Gandhinagar. According to the IIT-G analysis, the framework also failed to detect drought in areas like Punjab, where drought was declared only once between 2000 and 2017. Intensive groundwater irrigation helped the state maintain crop yields even when there were rainfall deficits. “In this case, the absence of a drought declaration may give a false sense of normalcy to farmers and other stakeholders in these regions, which may promote excessive groundwater pumping,” says the research paper. States may request additional financial assistance from the central government for moderate or severe droughts, contingent upon the availability of funds in their own Disaster Response Funds. Between 2020 and 2025, the central government was approached only 10 times for financial assistance, of which these requests were denied four times due to adequate funding available at the state level. Why drought is political Taking the scientific, administrative, and social requirements into account while declaring drought has often resulted in declaration becoming a politically contentious process. In Karnataka, where 101 taluks have been declared as having drought, deputy chief minister G. Parameshwara criticised the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party over its interventions through the declaration process. “The BJP had sent teams to assess the drought situation, but neither discussed their findings in the House nor submitted a report or even a letter to the Chief Minister or to me as Revenue Minister,” said Parameswara in a statement posted on social media on 26 August, “The State is facing drinking water shortages and farmers have suffered crop losses. The Opposition should have discussed these issues and offered constructive suggestions. Instead, they indulged only in politics in the House,” he said. Meanwhile, farmers from the Dharwad region in Karnataka are protesting their exclusion from the list of drought-affected taluks and blocks. The decision to declare certain blocks as having drought isn’t free from political calculations, research has found. A study of drought declarations between 2008 and 2019 from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka found that 1 in 3 drought-affected blocks received no relief, while more than 1 in 3 declarations went to blocks with normal or above-normal rainfall. Lisa Tarquinio, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, who conducted the research, contends that state ruling parties are more likely to support drought declaration in blocks where they face more electoral competition than in blocks where there is greater political alignment. In other words, declaring drought and securing relief could leverage greater support for the ruling party in blocks where they face tighter competition. However, she also found evidence of states misdirecting drought relief to areas facing non-drought related agricultural shocks, suggesting, “a potential use of discretion beyond seeking electoral support.” This misdirection can cost vulnerable farmers the most, she suggests. “Drought (or a negative rainfall shock) without relief continues to reduce agricultural production in the following year. And, in practice, relief that breaks with guidelines is directed to socioeconomically advantaged areas that exhibit improved agricultural outcomes,” Tarquinio wrote in her paper. Impact of the El Niño The El Niño’s impact on agriculture and drought is still unfolding, said B.N. Goswami, professor at Guwahati University and former director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. “There is no strong Indian Ocean dipole, and the whole Indian Ocean has warmer than normal temperatures, which indicates there is moisture available,” he said. Typically, El Niños produce dry conditions by disrupting the atmospheric wind patterns that bring moisture-laden winds to the subcontinent. But this depends on other atmospheric processes occurring simultaneously, including the Indian Ocean Dipole, that could blunt these impacts. In the past, El Niños have caused considerable damage to India’s agricultural yields. According to the ICAR, kharif production declined by 7 percent during the 1991-1992 El Niño, when rainfall was 91 percent of Long Period Average (LPA). “During the strong El Niño year of 2015-16, monsoon rainfall declined to 86% of LPA, resulting in reduced agricultural output by five percent, compared to the normal rainfall year of 2013-14,” the ICAR says. Farmers from Bagalkot have demanded changes in the criteria for declaring drought, so relief keeps up with these changing impacts, said Rudreshappa. “The dry spell is considered a period of three to four weeks with little to no rainfall. But sometimes, we have sporadic days of rainfall within that period which on paper seems like the dry spell is broken, but in reality doesn’t stop the crops from drying,” he explained, adding, “There are also demands for greater input subsidies, since the relief policy is now 10 years old.” This year, 315 districts are declared vulnerable to the impacts of El Niño. Of these, 111 districts have irrigation coverage below 25% and fall under the high-priority category. Banner image: A farmer stands on a parched paddy field near Jammu in 2014. Representative image. (AP Photo/Channi Anand)