Commuters hold umbrellas as they walk along a railway track amid rainfall in Kolkata, India on July 12, 2024. (Photo: AFP)
There is a particular kind of dread that comes not from chaos but from a familiar thing behaving strangely. A door that no longer closes the way it used to. A voice that has shifted in pitch. India’s monsoon now produces that feeling in people who have lived beside it their whole lives.
For centuries, farmers in this country read the sky the way the rest of us read a clock — instinctively, without needing to think about it. The clouds would arrive, the rains would come, the soil would answer.
That relationship, ancient and largely reliable, is fraying.
Not breaking apart dramatically, but fraying at the edges in ways that compound quietly until suddenly, one year, the floods arrive before the prayers do.
Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, director general of meteorology at the India Meteorological Department (IMD), spoke recently on a podcast by the Policy Perspectives Foundation about what is actually happening to the monsoon and why.
He is the kind of expert who makes complexity feel navigable without making it feel smaller than it is. Listening to him, you get the sense that understanding a problem clearly is itself a form of courage.
The forces shaping India’s rainfall are numerous and interlocking. El Niño weakens the circulation that carries moisture inland. Himalayan snow cover in winter suppresses what comes later. The Indian Ocean Dipole can amplify or cancel either effect.
For 2026, a mid-season shift toward El Niño suggests below-normal rainfall across much of the country, though the northeast region may receive more than its share.
And yet the risk of flooding has not decreased.
A drier year and a more dangerous one are no longer mutually exclusive — and once you sit with that sentence long enough to feel its full weight, the old vocabulary for talking about drought and flood begins to seem inadequate.
Warmer oceans hold more moisture, and that moisture has to go somewhere. Increasingly, it goes everywhere at once, briefly and with tremendous force.
In 2023, Chandigarh, in the north, received close to half of its annual rainfall in 50 hours. Kerala state, on the southernmost tip, faced a severe deficit in the same June.
These were not freak events happening in isolation. They were the same phenomenon wearing two different faces, separated by a few hundred kilometers and a twist of atmospheric pressure.
Meanwhile, the Himalayas are losing ice faster than old projections suggested. The glacial lakes left behind are unstable, prone to sudden ruptures of the kind that destroyed parts of Kedarnath in 2013 and flooded Sikkim a decade later.
Western disturbances are intensifying. Bay of Bengal systems are becoming harder to track. Each of these trends is concerning on its own. Together, they describe a monsoon system under sustained, escalating pressure from every direction simultaneously.
What Mohapatra offers, alongside the science, is something rarer in these conversations: an honest account of what preparedness actually looks like.
The IMD was founded in 1875, partly in the aftermath of disasters that better forecasting might have softened. In the century and a half since, it has grown into an institution capable of giving meaningful early warning for cyclones, heavy rainfall, and extreme heat.
Lives that would once have been lost are now saved because the right information reached the right people in time.
But he does not oversell what forecasting alone can accomplish. A four-day warning means nothing if the roads that relief would travel are already washed out. A drought prediction changes nothing for a farmer who cannot afford to switch crops on short notice.
Science creates a window. What we do with the view is a political and social question, not a meteorological one.
The monsoon does not threaten India in the abstract. It threatens specific people in specific places — smallholders without insurance, urban neighborhoods built on flood plains, mountain communities whose water supply depends on ice that is quietly disappearing.
The uneven distribution of that threat is not an accident of weather. It reflects decisions made long before the climate began to visibly shift, and it will be shaped by decisions being made right now in budget rooms and planning offices that rarely use the word monsoon at all.
The monsoon has not turned hostile. It has turned honest. It is simply reflecting the atmosphere we have built around it — warmer, wetter in the wrong places, drier in the ones that need rain most.
We talk about extreme weather as though nature has lost its temper. But the monsoon was never angry. It was always just a mirror, and we are only now bothered by what it shows.
Mohapatra mentions the arithmetic of individual energy consumption — how small, repeated acts aggregate into atmospheric consequences. Not as a guilt trip, but as a reminder that the distance between cause and effect in climate change is measured in decades and continents, which makes it easy to believe we are not part of the equation.
We are all part of the equation. The monsoon has always known this. It is only the rest of us who are catching up.
The rains will return. They will be different from what came before, and different again the year after. We can mourn the predictability we have lost, or we can build something more honest in its place. But we cannot do both, and the season will not wait.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
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