Essays · 24 Aug 2026 · 10 min read

El Niño can change the language and landscape of Indian agriculture

While food security is India’s priority, its entire subsidy based agri-economy needs to fight changes in weather patterns and must reinvent farming itself to make it a viable industry.

By Vishal Krishna
Monday, 24 August 2026

If a westerner or even a city dwelling Indian travelled to the farms they would be confused because they would struggle to understand the issues that make Indian farming unviable. Yet, as confounded as their findings may be, food still reaches everyone. But, the question to ask is then why is it always covered as a beast of burden, in the news, which still requires to be flogged for the benefit of the nation. Is it time for reinvention, that said India is reinventing the agri economy for eons. And today the time has come to reinvent itself because climate change will eventually break India’s food security.

Imagine yourself on a farm.

At dawn across the fertile plains of Punjab and the black-soil tracts of Maharashtra, a familiar routine unfolds. Deep beneath the topsoil, electric pumps hum into life, sucking up thousands of liters of groundwater to flood fields of thirsty paddy and sugarcane. The electricity costs the farmer nothing. The water is drawn without limit or penalty. On paper, this is the engine that feeds 1.4 billion people and underpins the world’s largest food security apparatus. In reality, it is an ecological and economic tragedy masking as State benevolence.

For decades, Indian agriculture has been treated not as a dynamic economic sector, but as an open-air political sanctuary.

Sheltered by massive state subsidies, insulated from market realities by powerful intermediaries, and shackled to antiquated farming techniques, the sector has hit a structural wall. Now, as the unpredictable wheels of climate change—accelerated by severe El Niño anomalies across Asia—disrupt the monsoons, India’s farming model faces an existential crisis.

Now, India’s agriculture sector faces an existential crisis driven by unsustainable, subsidy-driven water abuse and vulnerability to climate change, necessitating a radical shift from flood irrigation to precision agriculture and direct benefit transfers.

The core vulnerability is stark: over half of India’s net sown area is entirely at the mercy of rain, while the irrigated half is fast running dry due to systemic abuse. Since the current model relies heavily on free electricity and water, fostering monoculture and ecological degradation threatens long-term food security, particularly during El Niño events.

Agriculture is a State subject under the Indian Constitution, regional political parties routinely vie for the rural vote by offering free or heavily subsidized electricity to farmers.

The consequences have been catastrophic.

With no financial penalty for keeping pumps running for hours on end, India has become the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, accounting for more than 25 percent of the global total. Flood irrigation remains the dominant method, where entire fields are submerged in water. This practice wastes up to 60 percent of the water through evaporation and runoff, while simultaneously causing widespread soil salinity.

To survive an era of climate disruption and ensure long-term food security, India must fundamentally overhaul its agricultural landscape. Yet, technology alone cannot fix this. Before a drone can spray a crop or a sensor can optimize water usage, the underlying system—a tangled web of political patronage, water abuse, exploitative supply chains, and debt traps—must be thoroughly dismantled and reengineered.

The Starting Point

To understand the fragility of Indian food security, one must first look at the land itself. India possesses roughly 140 million hectares of net sown area. This vast expanse is split down the middle by a dangerous paradox: millions of smallholders gamble their entire livelihoods on a fickle sky, while those with irrigation are incentivized to deplete the earth's most precious resource.

Approximately 51 percent of India’s agricultural footprint (around 71 million hectares) lacks access to reliable artificial irrigation. This acts as the primary producer of the nation's pulses, oilseeds, millets, and coarse cereals. When an El Niño event delays or weakens the monsoon rains, these crops fail immediately, triggering localized economic collapse and soaring food inflation.

The remaining 49% (roughly 69 million hectares) is classified as irrigated. However, this definition is deeply deceptive. This zone is heavily reliant on groundwater via tube wells and surface water canals. Because these water sources are treated as infinite, free resources, they are being extracted at rates far exceeding natural replenishment. During prolonged dry spells, the water table plummets, rendering shallow wells useless and threatening the production of staple grains like rice and wheat.

Technology is frequently championed as the silver bullet for Indian agriculture, but remember that with a large government bureaucracy and vested private interests in the supply chain working together, technology becomes a meaningless tool to ensure accountability.

Economists and tech entrepreneurs envision a digitized countryside defined by smart irrigation, drone-assisted fertilizing, and AI-driven yield predictions. But introducing cutting-edge technology into the current Indian agricultural framework is like building a skyscraper on quicksand.

The systemic distortions are deep, institutionalized, and fiercely protected.

How Indian agriculture works:

Smallholder fragmentation and the productivity crisis

Indian agriculture is an industry of micro-businesses. Over 85 percent of India’s farmers are categorized as small and marginal, cultivating plots of land smaller than two hectares. These highly fragmented holdings prevent economies of scale. A farmer owning a single acre of land cannot afford a tractor, let alone expensive drip-irrigation infrastructure, specialized software, or advanced machinery.

Smallholders are trapped in a low-productivity cycle: they lack the capital to invest in efficiency, leaving them perpetually exposed to crop failure.

The journey of a crop from an Indian farm to a consumer’s plate continues to be controlled by an opaque network of middlemen, commission agents (arthiyas), and traders operating within the state-regulated Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMC) mandis.

Instead of an open, competitive market where farmers can discover the true value of their produce, the supply chain is heavily cartelized. Middlemen suppress purchase prices at the farm gate while inflating retail prices for urban consumers, pocketing massive margins. Without transparent, real-time price discovery, farmers have no financial incentive or market signal to switch from water-guzzling staples to high-value, climate-resilient fruits and vegetables.

Chemical Companies and Money Lenders

The state-backed formal banking sector often views smallholders as high-risk borrowers, and millions of farmers turn to informal credit channels. Local moneylenders—who frequently double as input dealers selling chemical fertilizers and pesticides—charge extortionate interest rates, sometimes exceeding 36 percent annually.

To maximize their returns, these input dealers push farmers to over-apply synthetic fertilizers such as heavily subsidized urea and harsh chemical pesticides. This creates a devastating dependency loop. The over-use of chemicals degrades the natural fertility of the soil and destroys beneficial microbial ecosystems, forcing the farmer to buy even more inputs the following season. When a climate shock like El Niño strikes and the crop fails, the farmer is left with zero income and a mountain of unpayable debt, an agonizing cycle that has fueled a chronic crisis of farmer suicides across the countryside.

As long as agriculture in India is a formidable political force, things are not going to change, and because the rural electorate dominates the demographics of most states, agricultural policy is dictated by populism rather than economic or ecological sense. Subsidies for fertilizers, power, water, and crop loans swallow an enormous portion of state and central budgets.

This short-sighted spending comes at a terrible cost: it crowds out public investment in long-term agricultural infrastructure, such as cold-storage networks, rural roads, public agronomic research, and modern canal management. The system actively pays farmers to deplete the nation's natural resources while starving the sector of the capital required to build genuine climate resilience.

Deconstructing the food security illusion

India regularly points to its massive grain reserves as proof of its agricultural success. The country's food security net is built upon three pillars: the National Food Security Act (NFSA), which legally guarantees highly subsidized food grains to nearly 67 percent of the population; the Public Distribution System (PDS), which moves millions of tons of rice and wheat across a nationwide network of fair-price shops; and the massive buffer stocks managed by the Food Corporation of India (FCI).

Yet, this system is an illusion of security. It is explicitly a calorific security system, not a nutritional one. By focusing almost exclusively on procurement guarantees via Minimum Support Prices, or MSP for just two primary staples—rice and wheat—the government has actively encouraged dangerous monoculture farming. Here is the explanation:

This single-minded focus on rice and wheat leaves the entire food security apparatus hyper-vulnerable to single climate anomalies. If a severe, multi-season El Niño cripples production in the primary grain-producing states of Punjab and Haryana, the national buffer stocks can quickly evaporate.

Furthermore, this policy has induced a nationwide crisis of "hidden hunger." While millions have access to basic carbohydrates, India continues to rank poorly on global hunger and nutrition indices due to severe micronutrient deficiencies caused by a diet lacking pulses, millets, vegetables, and diverse proteins.

Reengineering the machine: the path to accountability

If India is to secure its food supply in an era of climate volatility, the agricultural sector must introduce strict operational accountability. The transition requires a synchronized policy pivot that reforms the system before deploying technology, ensuring that technological tools have a fertile environment in which to succeed. These things mentioned below work only when the system accepts to use data across regions. The following points below need to scale beyond reasonable expectations.

Again all of this can make sense when the most critical step is to end the ruinous policy of free, unmetered electricity and water.

Instead, India must shift to a system of Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT). Under this framework, governments place a fixed, calculated cash subsidy directly into a farmer’s bank account for water and electricity. If the farmer conserves water and uses less power, they pocket the saved cash as pure profit. If they choose to waste water, they pay market rates for the excess consumption.

This simple economic shift instantly transforms water from an exploited freebie into a valuable, measurable asset, naturally driving the widespread adoption of precision water technologies.

Re-engineering Smallholder Productivity via FPOs and Financial Frameworks

To fix the smallholder fragmentation crisis, India must aggressively scale up Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs). By aggregating hundreds of small and marginal farmers into cohesive, corporate-style entities, FPOs allow smallholders to pool their land and resources.

To fund this transformation, dedicated financial frameworks must be established.

Rather than channeling credit via localized political subsidies, the central bank must mandate a specific sub-category within Priority Sector Lending (PSL) tailored exclusively for FPO capital expenditures.

Commercial banks must be incentivized to provide low-interest, long-term loans secured by asset pools rather than individual land titles. When backed by state-guaranteed credit-guarantee funds, these financial tools give small farmers the leverage to purchase modern inputs at wholesale prices, invest in shared high-tech assets like solar-powered micro-irrigation systems, and completely bypass predatory local moneylenders.

Breaking the Mandi monopolies for true price discovery

Real technological transformation requires open, competitive markets. The digital infrastructure for this already exists in the form of the Electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM), an online trading platform designed to connect far-flung mandis across state borders.

However, e-NAM’s potential is routinely sabotaged by regional political resistance and local middleman cartels. The state must step in to strictly enforce digital trade compliance, break up local market monopolies, and allow third-party logistics and cold-chain companies to integrate directly with farms. When a farmer can see transparent, real-time market prices across the entire country on a mobile app and sell directly to an institutional buyer, the traditional hold of the exploitative middleman evaporates.

Regional champions: how states pioneer of reform

A uniform national policy is impossible in a country as federally diverse as India, but several regional champions are proving that structural overhauls can succeed. Here are a few select examples of reform:

These regional interventions demonstrate that when political incentives are properly aligned with ecological parameters, farmers will eagerly trade outdated habits for measurable economic security.

The deployment of precision and climate-smart tech

Once these systemic economic, political, and financial distortions are corrected, advanced technology can be deployed with maximum efficiency:

Precision Micro-Irrigation: Scaling out localized drip and sprinkler systems that feed water and water-soluble fertilizers directly to plant roots. This approach cuts water usage by up to 60 percent, eliminates runoff, and stabilizes yields during severe dry spells.

Direct Seeded Rice (DSR): Moving away from traditional paddy transplantation, which requires fields to be completely flooded for weeks. DSR allows seeds to be drilled directly into the soil, saving massive amounts of water, lowering production costs, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate-Smart Cultivars: Accelerating the distribution of short-duration, drought-tolerant, and heat-resistant crop varieties developed by institutions like the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). These varieties can survive long dry spells and mature quickly, allowing farmers to adapt to truncated monsoon windows.

Digital Agronomy: Leveraging low-cost internet-of-things (IoT) soil sensors, satellite crop-health monitoring, and localized AI weather forecasting. These tools allow smallholders to apply fertilizers, pesticides, and water with surgical precision, reducing input costs, restoring soil health, and breaking the cycle of chemical over-reliance.

Conclusion: the urgency of change

India’s current agricultural model is an unsustainable relic of the mid-20th century. While the strategies of the Green Revolution successfully averted mass starvation decades ago, the modern compounding pressures of climate change, structural water scarcity, soil degradation, and deep systemic corruption have turned those very same strategies into a dangerous trap.

Continuing down the path of hyper-subsidization, unmetered resource extraction, and political appeasement is a recipe for ecological collapse and severe food insecurity. The recurring threats of El Niño are no longer isolated, unpredictable emergencies; they are clear, structural warnings that the environment can no longer tolerate an abusive, unaccountable farming system.

The path forward requires political courage and institutional accountability. India must leverage its considerable technological prowess not just as an ornamental add-on, but as the core architecture of a reformed agricultural economy. By transforming farming from a highly subsidized political sanctuary into a sustainable, tech-driven, and market-linked industry, India can finally secure its food supply, protect its natural resources, and provide its millions of smallholders with genuine economic stability. The time for political procrastination has run out; the future of India’s food security depends entirely on its willingness to change the system today.

If that's your day of being in the Indian farm, you would still be confused as to where change would begin.

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