India’s love-hate relationship with monsoons

The southwest monsoon has arrived in much of India. After months of oppressive summer heat, the first drops of monsoon rain, typically arriving in early June, are greeted with collective relief. Arundhati Roy’s The god of small things, set against the monsoons in Kerala, the Southern state where the monsoon arrives first, describes the beauty of petrichor, the smell of the earth just before it begins to rain. Bollywood films have long celebrated the monsoons, with countless songs dedicated to the rain. Raj Kapoor and Nargis sharing an umbrella in the rain in Shree 420 (1955) became shorthand for a whole generation’s idea of romance.

Where this relationship turns sour is when the drop turns into a downpour. In recent times, the uneven weather patterns have made the monsoons highly unpredictable. In the summer of 2025, apple farmers in Himachal Pradesh watched a year’s work rot by the roadside. August — the peak of the picking season, when the orchards of Kullu and Shimla are at their most valuable — brought landslides and flash floods which shut many roads and national highways simultaneously. Farmers were unable to reach the market and had to dump their harvest by the side of broken roads. The Indian monsoon has been growing erratic over the past few decades, but recent years have brought some of the clearest examples of that shift. Long dry spells are increasingly interrupted by intense rainfall, with a month’s worth of rain sometimes falling in a single day. In the first 27 days of May (1^st to 27^th May 2025), Mumbai City received 456.5 mm of rainfall, making it the wettest May in the city’s recorded history since 1918. The city recorded a record-breaking performance on May 26^th, when in the 24 hours between 8:30 am on May 25 and May 26, South Mumbai received 135.4 mm of rain against its normal for that single day of just 0.2 mm, as reported by Down to Earth. 

The fury of monsoons damages critical infrastructure, disrupts daily commute and triggers floods, landslides and other natural disasters. In the 2025 monsoon, for example, there were cloudbursts and flash floods in the Himalayas, and severe flooding in multiple states. According to Down to Earth, the 122 days of the 2025 monsoon season, from June to September, recorded extreme weather events across 35 states and Union Territories. The monsoon proved the most destructive period, accounting for the highest number of deaths and the greatest crop losses. At least 11 million hectares of cropped land were damaged across 23 states, representing around 65 per cent of the total affected nationwide. In 2026, just within weeks of the ‘official monsoon season’, national highways in Northern India have witnessed repeated disruptions as landslides and flash floods forced the closure of key national highways in states such as Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir. In the Northeastern state of Assam, the Associated Press reported, last few weeks of July 2026 have been particularly devastating, displacing over 700,000 people after days of heavy monsoon rain caused the Brahmaputra River, one of Asia’s largest rivers, to overflow.

One part of this is the unevenness of the weather patterns. Another part is the unreadiness of the infrastructure in the urban centers. For millions of commuters and workers, the romance of the rain quickly gives way to traffic paralysis, flooding and disrupts daily lives. In Gurugram in July 2025, major roads were blocked due to severe waterlogging, stranding multiple commuters trying to get back home in India’s millennium city. 

However, there is a huge dependence on monsoons. For the most populous country on the planet and the largest consumer of groundwater, most groundwater recharge occurs during the southwest monsoons. For rural India, the dependence on rainfall gets deeper. For a country where over half of net sown area remains rainfed and nearly half of its workforce is employed in agriculture, the utility of rainfall rises above romanticism; and impacts food security and economic stability. The right amount of rainfall keeps India’s food basket full and helps feed millions beyond its borders. For context, India is world’s largest rice exporter, supplying roughly 40% of global rice exports, according to APEDA, the Government of India’s agricultural export authority. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world’s population, meaning a bad monsoon in India is not merely a domestic concern. It impacts global food prices and a reliable monsoon season is a necessity, not a luxury.

The broader climate change agenda finds a mention here. Evidence suggests climate change is increasing the intensity of extreme rainfall events over South Asia, even as rainfall becomes more erratic in space and time. Rising temperatures increase the atmosphere’s moisture holding capacity, making heavier downpours more likely during storms. Yet climate change is only a part of the story. Extreme rainfall alone doesn’t explain why cities grind to a halt. Decades of human development, such as encroachment of riverbeds and floodplains converted into urban land, has altered nature’s safety buffer reducing the ability to absorb heavy rainfall.  

India is not alone. Across Asia, the monsoon is becoming increasingly volatile. Pakistan has endured successive years of destructive monsoon floods while China has seen record-breaking rainfall and flooding in many provinces. Although each country’s geography differs, the common thread is warming climate increasing the intensity of extreme rainfall. Evidence suggests that South Asia will experience more frequent and intense rainfall events over the coming decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2021, projects that heavy precipitation events will become more frequent and intense across Asia with every additional degree of warming, with larger increases under higher-emissions scenarios.

A way to manage this is to create infrastructure that’s weatherproof. Technology has a role to play, both in infrastructure preparedness as well as improving weather forecasting and early-warning systems; giving everyone time to plan for what’s coming next. Learning to live with increasingly erratic weather and finding resilience to withstand it is the only path forward. 

With all these factors at play, India can’t afford too little rain or too much of it. The monsoon will continue to shape India’s future, as it always has, but the future will increasingly be determined by how well India learns to live with a monsoon that’s no longer as predictable as the one celebrated in its songs and stories. Kajol, in the 1995 blockbuster movie, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, had the right idea. In the opening song, she is dancing in the rain, eyes closed, completely lost in the dream of it. No waterlogging. No WhatsApp thread about which roads are passable. Just the rain, and the feeling that something wonderful is about to arrive.