Every year, sometime between the last days of May and the first breath of June, fishermen on the Kerala coast look up and see the sky change colour. The clouds that gather off the Malabar shoreline are not the thin, translucent wisps of summer — they are dark, muscular, carrying the weight of the Indian Ocean in their bellies. When those clouds finally break over Thiruvananthapuram, the whole country holds its breath as that means the arrival of the monsoon and the beginning of India’s great annual reckoning.

This year, the Southwest Monsoon made landfall over Kerala on 4 June 2026 — three days later than its normal date of 1 June, and nine days behind the India Meteorological Department’s own forecast of 26 May. But the delay is almost beside the point.

What matters far more was the shadow already falling over the season: the IMD has forecast below-normal rainfall at just 90 per cent of the Long Period Average (LPA), with a 60 per cent probability of a deficient or drought monsoon. The culprit, as so often before, is El Niño — a warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that has, for centuries, starved the subcontinent of rain. And it has already started forming!

The Reckoning of Centuries

India’s relationship with its sky is ancient, and its ledger runs red. Research published in Geophysical Research Letters by Mishra et al. (2019) found that five of the six major famines recorded between 1870 and 2016 were caused primarily by soil moisture droughts driven by monsoon failures — many of them coinciding with strong El Niño events, precisely the pattern scientists warn of today.

The 1876–78 Great Famine, triggered when the monsoon collapsed across both south and north India, affected a population of 58.5 million people and killed between 6.1 and 10.3 million — one of the deadliest climate disasters in recorded human history. Colonial grain exports to England continued even as people starved, compounding the catastrophe.

Even before systematic records, drought shaped Indian civilisation. Researchers studying cave formations in the Garhwal Himalaya have traced extreme monsoon failures back centuries — including a severe event around 1400 CE that overlaps with the Durga Devi Famine, which devastated western India for more than a decade. The 1640 CE drought record in the same data aligned with the so-called ‘Ming Dynasty Drought’ that struck both China and northern India simultaneously. The monsoon, it turns out, is not merely a regional weather system. It is a planetary force.

The Western Ghats

From Kerala, the monsoon divides. One arm drives northeast, up the flanks of the Western Ghats — that ancient spine of mountains running 1,600 kilometres along India’s west coast. In Cherrapunji, the rain does not merely fall — it drowns. It has recorded over 11,000 millimetres of rainfall in a year, earning its reputation as one of the wettest places on earth. Yet even Cherrapunji has known drought; the monsoon’s cruelty lies not just in its absence but in the capriciousness of its distribution.

The Ghats act as both shield and sieve. Villages on the windward western slopes receive torrential rain — mango groves, paddy terraces, and spice plantations drink deep. Farmers in these zones often call the first week of the monsoon a kind of liberation — from debt, from anxiety, from the white-hot tedium of a pre-monsoon May. But the rain shadow on the Deccan side tells a different story: villages that wait while the Ghats catch the moisture, leaving the plateau drier and more anxious than the coast below.

The Economy in the Clouds

Agriculture accounts for approximately 18 per cent of India’s GDP at current prices, and employs around 42 per cent of the population. Around 55 per cent of India’s arable land remains rain-fed — directly dependent on what the sky provides. Even the irrigated 45 per cent is not immune: when reservoirs drop and groundwater falls in drought years, infrastructure becomes unreliable. The 2023 monsoon offered the most recent and painful proof.

That season ended with a 6 per cent overall deficit (5.6% per NABARD annual report), but the damage was brutally uneven — 221 out of 718 districts received below-normal rainfall. Pulse cultivation fell, oilseed planting dropped. India’s agricultural growth rate slumped to 1.4 per cent in FY24, the lowest figure in eight years, Foodgrain production declined to 328.8 million tonnes, down from the record 329.7 million in 2022–23. The inflation impact was immediate and felt hardest by those who could least afford it.

The Northern Plains and the Delta

By late June, if the monsoon is behaving, it crosses the Vindhyas into the great Indo-Gangetic Plain — the flatlands of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal that feed hundreds of millions. Kharif crops — rice, maize, cotton, sorghum — are sown in July. More than half of all Kharif sowing takes place in this single month, making July the most economically consequential four weeks in the Indian agricultural calendar. The IMD’s guidance and crop sowing bulletins, issued through this period, are tracked by commodity traders, state governments, and the federal Cabinet alike.

The monsoon’s final act plays out in the northeast. By early June, it reaches the Brahmaputra valley in Assam, where the river swells to a brown, muscular enormity, flooding tea gardens and rice fields alike. The Brahmaputra carries more water than almost any river on earth during peak monsoon — and its floods, though destructive, also deposit the rich silt that makes Assam’s plains among the most fertile in the country. It is a violent generosity that the people of this valley have learned to live with across generations.

Watch the Sky

Through all of this — from Kerala’s first shower to Assam’s last flood — the government of India shifts into a particular mode of attention. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs monitors crop sowing data weekly. The Ministry of Jal Shakti tracks reservoir levels across 150 major dams. The IMD issues ensemble forecasts every week through the season, and ministers speak of ‘normal monsoon’ or ‘deficit monsoon’ with the gravity of generals reporting from a front. Minimum support prices for crops are adjusted, buffer stocks managed, import duties on pulses and edible oils recalibrated. The monsoon does not just water fields — it rewrites fiscal policy in real time.

India has come far from 1877. Irrigation coverage has grown from 17 per cent in 1951 to over 47 per cent by 2011. Buffer food stocks give governments tools that colonial administrators never had. Weather forecasting has improved beyond recognition — the IMD’s 2025 forecast of Kerala onset on 27 May was accurate to within three days. And yet, as the 2026 season begins under the shadow of a potentially super El Niño, with 90 per cent of LPA forecast and 60 per cent odds of deficiency, the fundamental truth remains unchanged: India lives, breathes, and eats by the grace of its sky. The monsoon and India are still twins — and this year, as always, they are testing each other.