A background note can be accessed here: Lok Sabha Q&A: Government Strengthens Drought Preparedness Amid El Niño Concerns
The Government's response outlines a multi-agency framework for drought monitoring, combining meteorological forecasts, reservoir levels, crop conditions, and district-level assessments to improve preparedness. To what extent should India shift its policy focus from forecasting droughts to institutionalising anticipatory action?
India's monitoring architecture, built around the Crop Weather Watch Group, district contingency plans and satellite-based crop assessments, is among the most sophisticated in the developing world. However, the constraint is not forecast quality. It is that a forecast that triggers no pre-agreed action changes nothing on the ground.
The shift required is to complement forecasting with institutionalised pre-commitment. Globally, anticipatory action still accounts for well under one percent of humanitarian financing despite substantial gains in early warning. India's own experience shows why. Crop insurance payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) have been chronically delayed, often arriving months after the harvest, largely because of delays in the release of state premium-subsidy shares, leading the government to introduce an automatic penalty for delayed settlement in 2024. Likewise, the 2016 Drought Management Manual, by tightening the declaration criteria, has lengthened rather than shortened the path to relief. Assistance that arrives after distress sales, migration and other coping decisions often leaves households more exposed.
India should institutionalise trigger-based protocols under which a defined rainfall deficit automatically releases pre-positioned funds and inputs ahead of a formal drought declaration. This requires standing budget lines, pre-defined operating procedures and a clear allocation of authority among the Centre, states and districts before drought conditions intensify, rather than during the crisis itself.
The drought preparedness framework relies on central institutions for monitoring and guidance while implementation rests largely with states and districts. How can India strengthen local resilience without diluting the benefits of a nationally coordinated approach?
The real question is where each tier of governance holds its comparative advantage. National institutions, namely the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the Central Water Commission (CWC) and the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), have capabilities in forecasting, data analysis and inter-state coordination that no district can replicate, and these functions should remain centralised. At the same time, drought impacts are highly localised. The same rainfall deficit can devastate a rainfed millet district while barely affecting an irrigated neighbour. One-size-fits-all contingency plans cannot accommodate that heterogeneity.
The answer is a more clearly defined division of labour. The Centre should set standards, generate forecasts and provide finance, while districts and panchayats should exercise local discretion over crop choices, water-body management and household prioritisation because that is where local knowledge and vulnerability data reside.
India already has institutional experience to build on. Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), now succeeded by the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G), employment was locally planned yet nationally funded. During the 2015–16 drought, the Centre extended the employment guarantee from 100 to 150 days in drought-notified areas. Yet the same episode also exposed institutional constraints. The extension lapsed while the drought persisted, and because funding was provided only as reimbursement for completed work, districts could not readily initiate additional works. Real decentralisation requires devolved funds, functions and functionaries, alongside the flexibility to act before local conditions deteriorate, rather than merely devolved responsibility.
While the Government's response focuses on preparedness for a potential El Niño-driven drought, climate variability is likely to make such events more frequent and complex. What longer-term institutional and policy reforms are needed to move beyond seasonal crisis management towards durable drought resilience?
The government's seasonal measures, such as drought-tolerant varieties, seed banks and contingency plans, are necessary but structurally reactive. They manage each El Niño as it arrives rather than reducing the vulnerability that makes each one costly. As climate variability raises the frequency and cascading effects of shocks, hazard-by-hazard management becomes fiscally and humanly unsustainable.
Three reforms can strengthen long-term resilience. First, establish risk-financing mechanisms using pre-arranged instruments such as parametric insurance and state-level risk pools that pay out against predefined rainfall-deficit triggers, reducing payout delays that often extend for months. Second, improve water-use efficiency because drought resilience ultimately depends on groundwater management and irrigation efficiency. Greater investment in micro-irrigation and aquifer governance therefore deserves sustained policy priority. Third, integrate drought into development planning so that cropping incentives, Minimum Support Price (MSP) signals and watershed investment remain aligned with agro-climatic realities throughout the year, embedding resilience within routine planning rather than treating drought primarily as a disaster-response challenge.
Climate resilience should be built between droughts through institutions that steadily reduce vulnerability over time. Ultimately, the measure of India's framework is whether the coming El Niño costs measurably less than the last one.