El Niño test again, but India needs new answers

Tests are seldom pleasant. They are useful, however, in exposing one’s weaknesses, and showing where one can improve. Consider the El Niño a recurring examination of India’s atmanirbharta — its ability to withstand a warmer, less predictable world without being held hostage by empty reservoirs, imported food or geopolitical goodwill.

After all, it is periodic, as good tests are, returning every two to seven years, leaving just enough time to learn before the next paper is set. It is comprehensive. By disrupting the monsoon, El Niño strikes first at agriculture, which still provides employment to nearly half of India’s workforce. Its impacts then travel through food prices, rural demand and industries from FMCG to two-wheelers and construction.

Cities are not spared either. Research by the Sundaram Climate Institute suggests that in El Niño years, roughly half of urban households face some form of water insecurity. The added heat makes cities thirstier even as unreliable rainfall constricts their water supply. To wit, water levels at many reservoirs are currently below normal. Bengaluru must be feeling especially anxious about drinking water. Paradoxically, when it rains, it is intense, something Mumbai can attest to; and while statisticians take cold comfort that the rainfall deficit has shrunk, the lived reality is less comforting. Importantly, the test examiner is impartial: pleading, bribing, opacity, and coercion change nothing. It is what it is. And ‘it’ is getting more volatile.

India has sat this test before. Its answers reveal a remarkable capacity to build institutions and a tendency to solve one vulnerability by creating another. Consider 1877-78 when a powerful El Niño struck, and a famine killed millions in India. But to blame climate alone is incomplete. India, governed in British interests, continued exporting grain while a tightfisted colonial administration skimped on relief and spent money on imperial priorities (like a war and an opulent Durbar). The El Niño supplied the shock; poor governance converted that into disaster. But this tragedy did spur demand for better meteorological data and strengthen the newly created India Meteorological Department. It also bolstered early nationalist organisations such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, as anger over the relief effort hardened into a broader indictment of colonial taxation, trade and unrepresentative rule.

Another big test came in the mid-1960s. India, at war with Pakistan and dependent on cheap American wheat, was held “ship to mouth”. The institutions created around that period—the Food Corporation of India and minimum support prices—combined with the Green Revolution, transformed agriculture in the following decades. India is food secure today, and more assertive than it otherwise could have been. Could we have embarked on Operation Sindoor against Pakistan if America held the key to filling our bellies? Part of the price for this strategic independence is paid by the groundwater of India’s dry northwest, with enough water withdrawn to tilt the Earth itself. The other cost is eye-watering food and fertiliser subsidies.

What we built to escape one vulnerability has spawned others: a critical breadbasket potentially running dry and fiscal strains on states. Then there’s the puzzle of 1997, where the century’s strongest El Niño failed to break the monsoon. This drove research that formally recognised the role of the Indian Ocean Dipole in modulating El Niño’s grip on India’s rains.

Also, Punjab fields, fully irrigated by then, saw yields hold steady (they dipped the following year). Climate was powerful; our answers taught us, just not all-powerful. The El Niño of 2015-16, as powerful as the 1877 monster, offered another kind of warning. Widespread irrigation access, in states like MP and Gujarat, food stocks and employment-guarantee schemes cushioned the blow; but over 2,500 died in record heatwaves; power stations shut down, as they ran short of cooling water (as France’s nuclear stations have this year), highlighting the instability of coal when built on a shaky water foundation. Chennai flooded, in part because it had built over the landscape’s capacity to absorb it. In the following years, Odisha, where irrigation was patchy, launched its Millet (which are climate-resilient) Mission; solar power scaled to great heights; the country began counting its waterbodies. And a climate innovation ecosystem emerged.

What do these old ‘test papers’ teach us? First, El Niños expose gaps, including in climate science, water management, agricultural and trade policy, urban planning, and energy systems. Second, trade can cushion scarcity when geopolitics permits. Third, climatic shocks are unavoidable; catastrophe is not. The difference lies in institutions built to handle the emergency.

India needs a new climate paradigm suited to a hotter century: cities that understand managed solid waste, lakes and treated sewage as pillars of national security; farms that build soil carbon and use water more wisely, and better market access for them. The hardest task will be reforming what India grows, where it grows it and whom the state rewards. But that is atmanirbharta’s real test: changing yesterday’s answers before El Niño marks them wrong.

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