El Niño is coming. Are India’s farmers ready?
After two consecutive years of above-normal monsoons in 2024 and 2025, the weather cycle is turning. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has lowered its 2026 monsoon forecast to just 90% of the Long Period Average, warning that El Niño conditions are developing and likely to strengthen through the June-September season. June alone is projected at 92% of LPA, which could delay Kharif sowing across most of the country.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has put the probability of El Niño conditions taking hold during the monsoon season at over 80%. Its Secretary-General, Celeste Saulo, has warned that “the footprint of an El Niño travels far beyond its origins in the Pacific Ocean, impacting agriculture, energy supplies, trade, water resources, supply chains, and livelihoods across entire regions.”
In India, nearly half of the country’s cultivated land is rain-fed. Crops like paddy, soybean, pulses, and oilseeds grown across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana and Gujarat are all heavily dependent on timely, well-distributed rainfall. And as crop insurance experts have noted, even a moderate seasonal shortfall of 8-10% can cause considerable yield damage through delayed onset, long dry spells, and extreme spatial unevenness that aggregate rainfall numbers simply do not capture.
What is El Niño?
El Niño is a periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. It occurs every two to seven years, typically lasting nine to twelve months. The last significant El Niño in 2023–24 was one of the five strongest on record, contributing to record global temperatures in 2024. The upcoming El Niño is expected to break the 2024 records.
The WMO is careful to note that climate change does not necessarily increase the frequency of El Niño events, but it does amplify their consequences. A warmer ocean and atmosphere generate more energy and moisture, making associated weather events (droughts, heatwaves, and extreme rainfall) more intense when they do occur.
For Indian agriculture, El Niño years are associated with below-normal monsoons, prolonged dry spells, and heat stress during critical crop growth periods. Rice, pulses, cotton, sugarcane, and oilseeds are all at risk when rainfall arrives late or unevenly. The ripple effects in turn causes rural incomes to fall, food prices to climb, and increases financial pressure on households across the country.
PMFBY
India’s flagship Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), launched in 2016, is the largest crop insurance scheme in the world by farmer enrolment. The total number of farmers enrolled has risen from 3.17 crore in 2022–23 to 4.19 crore in 2024–25, a 32% increase. Since inception, over 78 crore farmer applications have been insured under PMFBY, with 22.67 crore farmers receiving claims totalling ₹1.83 lakh crore. The Union Cabinet approved its continuation through 2025–26 with a budget of ₹69,515 crore.
PMFBY operates on the principle of “One Nation, One Crop, One Premium.” Farmers pay a fixed, subsidised premium (2% for Kharif crops, 1.5% for Rabi crops, and 5% for commercial and horticultural crops) with the central and state governments covering the remaining premium cost. Coverage spans the entire crop cycle: pre-sowing, standing crop, and post-harvest losses.
The scheme protects against drought, dry spells, floods, inundation, pest attacks, diseases, landslides, natural fires, cyclones, and unseasonal rains. Localised calamities like hailstorms and cloudbursts are also covered. Post-harvest losses during the drying period for up to 14 days after harvest can be claimed if caused by cyclonic or unseasonal rainfall.
India’s broader crop insurance market
PMFBY is not the only mechanism available to Indian farmers. The Restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS) provides an alternative approach, compensating farmers based on deviations from reference weather parameters (rainfall, temperature, humidity) rather than requiring actual yield assessment. This allows faster claim settlement and is particularly useful in regions with limited crop-cutting infrastructure.
Several states also offer their own supplementary schemes. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have run state-level income support programmes alongside PMFBY. Some private insurers offer standalone add-on products covering specific risks like unseasonal hail or irrigated crop losses for farmers outside the PMFBY net.
Technology for crop insurance
India’s crop insurance infrastructure has been strengthening steadily. The PMFBY portal and app now use AI-driven loss assessments and satellite-based yield estimation, reducing the dependence on manual crop-cutting experiments and speeding up claim processing. Around 80% of claims are said to be now processed within 30 days, and Direct Benefit Transfer ensures payments reach farmers’ bank accounts without intermediaries (one of the measures to combat the increasing incidence of crop insurance fraud.) The 2025 updates also introduced blockchain-based transparency mechanisms to reduce disputes.
The government’s push toward Agri Stack and digital land records is further streamlining enrolment, a key challenge given that a significant portion of eligible farmers, particularly non-loanee farmers, have historically remained outside the scheme’s coverage.
What farmers need to do
With El Niño developing and the Kharif sowing season at the door, the window for enrolment is narrow.
The Kharif enrolment deadline is usually the 31st of July every year, while the Rabi enrolment deadline is 31st of December.
Enrolment can be done through insurancepe, bank branches, Common Service Centres (CSCs), cooperative societies, or directly at pmfby.gov.in. Loss must be reported within 72 hours of the event for a claim to be considered.
Climate change is making Indian agriculture more unpredictable. Conditions such as El Niño, erratic monsoons, and intensifying weather events are not one-time-events and are predicted to worsen due to the impact of climate change.
Crop insurance is the only tool that translates that uncertainty into a manageable, quantified risk.
For farmers: enrol before the deadline, understand your coverage, and report losses promptly. For everyone else: the food on your plate and the stability of rural India depends on a farming sector that can survive a bad monsoon. Crop insurance is part of how that resilience gets built.
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