Skymet Weather Services, India's largest private weather forecasting agency, has issued its starkest monsoon warning of the year, slashing its 2026 rainfall forecast and placing the probability of a nationwide drought at 70%, a 7-in-10 chance that this year will go down in the record books as a drought year. For a country where the annual monsoon determines what billions of people eat and what they pay for it, the forecast is more than a weather update. It is an economic alarm bell.
The agency revised its seasonal rainfall estimate to just 85% of the LPA (long period average - the ‘normal’ or benchmark amount of rain India should receive, calculated by averaging rainfall over the past 50 years; it works out to roughly 869mm across the four monsoon months of June to September). In plain terms, India is on track to receive only 85 rupees' worth of rain for every 100 it normally gets — and the shortfall is already visible in dry fields, delayed sowings, and thinning reservoirs across the country.
A Season That Started Badly and Has Not Recovered
The story of the 2026 monsoon is one of a season that stumbled at the start and has never found its footing. June — the month when the southwest monsoon (seasonal winds that blow in from the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, carrying the moisture that delivers 70%–80% of India's annual rainfall in just four months) normally arrives and sets the tone — ended at a shocking 65% of LPA. Farmers who had prepared their fields were left waiting. Seeds stayed unsown. The soil stayed dry.
July brought some relief. The rains picked up pace in the second half of the month and helped close the gap, finishing roughly at break-even. But the respite was short-lived. Skymet now forecasts August at 84% of LPA and September — the final and crucial month of the monsoon season — at just 80% of LPA. Taken together, rainfall between 1st June and 31 July 2026 already ran 13% below normal, and the agency sees no meaningful recovery in the weeks ahead.
El Niño: The Pacific Phenomenon Stealing India's Rain
Behind the numbers is a force playing out thousands of kilometres away from Indian shores. The culprit is El Niño (pronounced ‘El Neen-yo’ — a Spanish phrase meaning ‘The Little Boy’, historically named by South American fishermen because it tends to peak around Christmas; in weather science, it refers to the periodic and abnormal warming of the surface of the equatorial Pacific Ocean). Under normal conditions, the Pacific stays relatively cool near the equator and the winds and weather patterns that bring rain to India flow as expected. But when El Niño develops — when that vast stretch of ocean heats up unusually — it reshuffles atmospheric circulation across the entire planet. Some regions flood. Others, including India, go dry.
For India, the relationship between El Niño and a weak monsoon is well established. The warmer Pacific weakens the winds that carry moisture from the ocean onto the subcontinent, choking the rain before it can reach farmers' fields. It has happened before — in 2002, 2004, 2009, and 2015 — and it is happening again in 2026.
What makes this year particularly concerning is the speed at which El Niño is intensifying.
Jatin Singh, managing director (MD) of Skymet, warned this week that El Niño is likely to make a transition from ‘strong’ to ‘very strong’ — and potentially into Super El Niño territory (an unusually powerful version of El Niño that causes significantly more damage to weather patterns globally than a regular event) — by early-September.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and India's own meteorological department (IMD) have both confirmed they expect El Niño to dominate global climate patterns through the August–October window, pushing temperatures above normal across much of the world.
One Hope, and Why It May Not Be Enough
Forecasters are watching a second ocean phenomenon that could, in theory, soften the blow — the IOD, or Indian Ocean Dipole (best understood as a ‘temperature seesaw’ in the Indian Ocean: when the western side, near the coast of Africa, is warmer than the eastern side near Indonesia, it tends to push more rain toward India; this warmer-west state is called a ‘positive IOD’ and historically acts as a partial antidote to El Niño's dry influence). A positive IOD could bring supplementary rainfall and partially compensate for what El Niño is taking away.
The positive IOD does appear to be developing. But forecasters at both Skymet and the IMD are candid about the uncertainty: its timing remains unclear and its eventual strength — the critical factor - is still an open question. At this point in the season, with August and September already forecast to be deficit months, there is little confidence that the IOD will arrive strongly enough and early enough to make a decisive difference.
Farmers Are Already Paying the Price
While the debate plays out in meteorological charts and ocean temperature readings, the impact on the ground is immediate and severe. India's monsoon crop season is called the Kharif season (an Arabic-origin word meaning ‘autumn harvest’ - referring to crops that are sown at the onset of the monsoon in June–July and harvested in October–November; the major kharif crops are rice, cotton, pulses such as tur dal and moong dal, and oilseeds like groundnut and soybean). This single season accounts for roughly half of India's entire annual food grain production - and it is in serious trouble.
Because June was so arid, farmers across the country delayed sowing or skipped it altogether. Total kharif planting area has fallen 23% compared to the same period last year, a collapse spanning almost every major crop category. Rice is down. Pulses are down. Oilseeds have more than halved in planted area. By early August, over a third of India was already classified as being under drought conditions, with crops that did get planted now struggling through their most critical growth stages—the weeks when steady soil moisture is the difference between a harvest and a failure.
Sowing of paddy (rice), pulses, and cotton is running 3%–8% below last year's levels even as of mid-August, according to the agriculture ministry. Overall area under kharif planting is down more than 2%.
A Crisis That Will Reach Every Kitchen
The consequences will not stay in the fields. Agriculture contributes roughly 18% of India's GDP (gross domestic product — the total monetary value of all goods and services produced in the country in a year; a measure of the size of the economy). More directly, it is the livelihood of hundreds of millions of rural families. When the harvest shrinks, food supply tightens — and prices rise for everyone.
The crops most at risk are the staples that sit on every Indian plate: rice, dal, cooking oil and vegetables. A shortage in any one of these pushes up prices in every city and town across the country. Beyond food, rural households that earn less spend less — fewer motorcycles, tractors, refrigerators and consumer goods are purchased, slowing down industries with no direct connection to farming.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has issued a stark warning. Its natural resources officer, Jorge Alvarri-Beltran, was blunt: "Whenever there is a reduction in monsoon and rainfall, the first and direct hit is to the agricultural system. A farmer first loses his standing crop, then his cattle die due to lack of fodder — and in no time his entire livelihood comes to an end."
FAO has assessed the 2026 El Niño cycle as potentially the most damaging in recent history, a risk compounded by rising global fuel and fertiliser costs that are already squeezing farmers on their input expenses.
The Weeks Ahead Will Be Decisive
India has weathered drought years before — in 2009, the monsoon delivered just 78% of normal rainfall, and the country managed through a combination of government intervention, food stocks, and agricultural resilience. But each drought exacts a cost: on farmers, on food prices, on the rural economy, and on the millions of Indians who live closest to the edge.
The next four to six weeks the remainder of August and the month of September will determine how this story ends. If El Niño strengthens as rapidly as Skymet fears and the IOD fails to deliver, India could be looking at one of its worst monsoon seasons in over a decade. If there is any silver lining, it is that forecasters, governments, and farmers now have more data, better tools, and more experience managing drought conditions than ever before.
For now, though, the clouds that matter most are still refusing to gather.
