Instead, the rains failed, his 300-foot borewell dried up, and the soybean plants withered. When Lal Singh Thakur sowed soybean on his three-acre farm in Pipla, Nagpur, in July, he was hoping the monsoon would revive his crop.
“I will not earn a penny from it this year. This year, he does not expect to recover his investment. Thakur is not alone. The deficit has been particularly sharp in several agricultural regions. The impact on crops, however, is unlikely to be uniform. The bigger impact is expected in drought-affected parts of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka, where farmers remain more dependent on rainfall. That assessment is in line with the government’s own production target. But the decline in acreage has so far been much smaller than the rainfall deficit. The recovery in rainfall during July helped water-intensive crops such as rice and sugarcane recover after a dry June. This has shifted the main risk from acreage to yield. The crop impact will also differ by variety and region. Paddy acreage has fallen mainly in southern states as farmers moved away from rain-dependent cultivation, while soybean productivity is likely to come under pressure in parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. For many farmers like Thakur, however, the impact is already visible. His borewell, which sustained his soybean crop for a while after sowing, has dried up.
I had invested ₹ 40,000 in it,” said Thakur, who used, soybean saved from last year’s harvest as seed. Last year, he harvested about 18 quintals from the same land and earned around ₹ 1 lakh after expenses. His misfortune in Maharashtra ’s Vidarbha region is a reflection of the stress being reported from several rain-dependent farming areas as the southwest monsoon draws to a close with a 15% rainfall deficit across the country. India received 703.7mm of rain against the normal 827.2mm between June 1 and September 21, according to the latest India Meteorological Department (IMD) data. Rainfall is 27% below normal in the south peninsula, 26% below normal in east and northeast India and 10% below normal in northwest India. Marathwada has recorded a 37% deficit, Telangana 21%, coastal Andhra Pradesh 37%, while Karnataka’s three main subdivisions have deficits ranging from 28% to 32%. The India Drought Monitor, maintained by the Water and Climate Lab at IIT Gandhinagar , puts 52.5% of the country’s area in the drought category, compared with 47.5% classified as normal. Maharashtra is among the states with the largest drought-affected areas, at 83.5%, according to the monitor. It has set the 2026-27 kharif production target at 176.16 million tonnes, only marginally higher than the 176.04 million tonnes produced in 2025-26. The Centre has also set a paddy procurement target of 70.864 million tonnes for the 2026-27 Kharif Marketing Season, beginning October 1. This is lower than the 72.074 million tonnes procured as of August 5 this year and the 70.885 million tonnes procured during the 2024-25 season. A recent CRISIL report said kharif sowing stood at 98% of the normal area and 96% of last year’s level. In Nagpur, he said, large residential societies with borewells reaching about 1,000 feet are the only ones still able to access water.
Because he does not expect enough water to cultivate it, he has not planned his rabi crop.
The field is now so dry, he said, that even animals have little to graze on. Former agriculture secretary Devesh Chaturvedi said well-irrigated areas such as Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh are unlikely to see significant yield declines. “Overall output will be lower than last year,” Chaturvedi said, pointing out that 2025-26 was a bumper production year. Chaturvedi, however, said a lower harvest should not translate into a food shortage. India already produces a substantial surplus of several crops, he said, and should have enough food to meet domestic requirements. In rain-stressed areas, farmers also shifted towards shorter-duration crops such as maize, bajra and moong, CRISIL said. Relatively drought-resistant crops such as urad, jowar and bajra, which require less water, could perform better, Chaturvedi said. Thakur said local officials have begun surveys to assess crop losses, but he is not hopeful of receiving state assistance.
There is, however, a larger buffer than in the past. Crops have been sown on 110.4 million hectares, down 1.3% from a year earlier, with paddy acreage down 3.7% and maize acreage down 2.2%. Rainfall was about 35.4% below normal in June before recovering to around 1% above normal in July. The deficit widened again to about 16% in August, while September rainfall has remained weak and uneven. Groundnut acreage, for instance, recovered in Gujarat, but only 49.3% of the state’s groundnut area was irrigated in 2024-25, leaving parts of the crop exposed to weaker rainfall later in the season. Irrigation coverage has risen to about 60% of net sown area in 2024-25, from 48.8% in 2015-16, according to CRISIL.
Because of deficient rainfall and limited irrigation coverage in some regions, cRISIL identified cotton, bajra, maize, tur, groundnut and soybean as being particularly vulnerable.
