India’s monsoon this year has stopped behaving like a season and started behaving like two contradictory seasons occupying the same calendar. As Assam and Gujarat count their dead and evacuate their villages, Karnataka, Telangana, and Jharkhand are quietly declaring drought.
The flood ledger. In Assam, the crisis has deepened by the week: flood-swollen rivers have submerged 872 villages, triggered Himalayan landslides, and drawn red, orange, and yellow alerts across multiple states, with the death toll reaching 61 and more than seven lakh people affected across several districts. In Gujarat, continuous heavy rainfall from multiple low-pressure systems and an active western disturbance has forced the evacuation of over 40,500 people, while IMD has issued a red alert for Gujarat and Madhya Maharashtra, forecasting extremely heavy rainfall exceeding 204.5 mm in isolated pockets — with alerts extended to seventeen states nationwide.
The drought ledger, four hundred kilometres and a world away. Karnataka’s Deputy Chief Minister has called his state’s situation “extremely serious,” and the numbers support the alarm: the state has recorded a 35 per cent rainfall deficit between June 1 and July 22, with 24 districts facing deficient rainfall. Jharkhand’s crisis runs deeper still. Of the state’s 24 districts, 18 fall in the deficient category and five in the large-deficient category — only one district has recorded normal rainfall. The worst-hit pockets are stark: Sahibganj has recorded a 99 per cent rainfall deficit, Garhwa 66 per cent, Pakur 65 per cent, and Deoghar 62 per cent. Telangana sits squarely in the same column — 25 of its 33 districts have received below-normal rainfall this season.
One number holds both Indias together. As of 13 July, IMD data showed 397 of India’s 741 districts — more than half the country — running below normal, including 326 with deficient rainfall and 71 with large deficiencies. Kharif sowing nationally stood 16 per cent behind last year’s pace, with oilseeds, coarse grains, pulses, cotton, and rice all lagging. And the reservoirs that would ordinarily cushion either extreme are themselves depleted: only 26 per cent of water remains across 166 monitored dams nationally, with the situation most dire in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Jharkhand — meaning the very regions drowning have little spare capacity to share with the regions parched, and vice versa.
Why is this happening in the same season? The mechanics trace to the same forces this cover package has followed all issue. A strengthening El Niño is suppressing the broad, steady convection that once defined the monsoon’s character, while the monsoon trough — the atmospheric spine that decides where rain concentrates — has been sitting unusually persistently over the northwest and northeast, feeding Gujarat and Assam’s depressions while starving the peninsula and the eastern plateau states beneath it. This is not two separate weather events; it is one erratic monsoon distributing its shortfall and its surplus with extreme unevenness, rather than spreading either evenly across the map — precisely the deficit-year paradox this issue’s Article 8 documents at the national scale, now visible in sharp, live relief at the state level.
What to watch. IMD’s continuing alerts across seventeen states suggest the flood half of this story is not over; simultaneously, Karnataka and Jharkhand’s deficits show no sign of the “partial July recovery” that lifted the national number from its mid-June collapse. The uncomfortable truth for policymakers is that neither crisis can currently rescue the other — floodwater in Assam cannot be moved to a dry field in Jharkhand, and the two states’ emergency responses, evacuation versus contingency cropping, draw on entirely different arms of government simultaneously, at a moment when both are already stretched by the season’s overall shortfall.
– Ennen
