When the Rain Forgets Manipur

Seventy-five years of records confirm what every valley farmer already knows: the monsoon now comes late, leaves early and returns as a flood. And we are making it worse.

Walk the paddy fields of Manipur Valley in late July and you will see what the numbers say. Seedlings that should have been planted in the first week of the month are still waiting in their nurseries, turning yellow and leggy. The earth is cracked, the sky is clear, and the tractors hired for puddling stand idle at the edge of the field. A few weeks later, the same fields may be under water.

This is no longer an unusual year in Manipur. It is the new normal. And as the sickles come out this autumn, the 2026 harvest is about to show us, in bags and tins, what an unusual year now costs.

A monsoon in retreat

In the 1990s, Manipur received an average of 1,995 mm of rain a year. In the decade after 2000, that fell to 1,433 mm. Since 2011 it has recovered only to about 1,523 mm. The monsoon itself, the June-to-September rain that feeds our kharif paddy, has shrunk by roughly 30 per cent. In plain terms, a valley farmer today works with something like two-thirds of the monsoon water his father could count on.

Half of the 34 years between 1991 and 2024 were deficient, with rainfall more than 20 per cent below normal. The recent run reads like a warning: a 56 per cent monsoon deficit in 2019, 46 per cent in 2020, 57 per cent by early August 2021, 46 per cent in 2023 and 31 per cent in 2024.

This year has been among the worst of them. June rainfall was about 71 per cent below normal, and even after showers arrived in early July, the month closed 41 per cent short. Imphal West was more than 52 per cent short across June and July. August, the month in which a transplanted crop tillers and builds its strength, ended 49 per cent below normal, and September was deficient again. By the close of the season, the India Meteorological Department placed Manipur 45 per cent below normal, the second-worst deficit in the country after Meghalaya. Nationally, 2026 was the fourth-weakest monsoon since 2001, with a strengthening El Niño blamed for much of it.

Yet when the rain does come, it comes with violence. Rain that was once spread over about 300 days is now packed into 60 to 120. Daily totals above 64 mm are common; Imphal West recorded 197.8 mm in a single day in May 2025. Short, fierce spells followed by long dry gaps are the worst possible pattern for rice, which wants steady standing water, not a flood one week and a drought the next. The nights are warmer too: the mean minimum temperature rose from 13.8 °C to 15.3 °C between 1954 and 2011.

The farmer pays first

Rice covers about two-thirds of Manipur’s cropped area and makes up almost all of its food-grain output, and most of it depends entirely on the sky. Scientists at Central Agricultural University, Imphal, advise transplanting in the first week of July so that the crop flowers in early October, when temperatures sit between 25 and 35 °C. When the rains fail, transplanting slips to the end of July. Flowering then meets cold nights below 20 °C, pollination fails, and the grain does not fill. The farmer sees a field that looks green and healthy until he presses the panicle and finds it empty.

Farmers are adapting the only way they can. They are giving up long-duration native varieties of 130 to 135 days for quicker cultivars such as Imoinu Phouo. Even so, harvests swing wildly. State rice output fell from 567,400 tonnes in 2021–22 to 349,200 tonnes in 2022–23, a drop of 38 per cent. Some farmers saw their yield fall from about 30 bags per sangam to between 6 and 10. Many of them do not own the land they till; they owe the landlord his agreed bags of paddy whether the harvest is good or bad, so a poor year does not only empty the granary, it pushes the family into debt.

Then there are the floods. Since 2017, not a single year has passed without a major flood or drought, and in 2017, 2022 and 2024 Manipur suffered both. Cyclone Remal’s floods in 2024 affected 188,143 people and damaged 24,265 houses. The Tupul landslide of 2022 claimed 79 victims after 348.5 mm of June rain fell on slopes already cut open by construction. The June 2025 floods affected more than 1.6 lakh people and triggered 169 landslides in a matter of days.

This year’s harvest: what the fields are likely to give

Harvesting of the main kharif crop is now under way in the valley and in the hills, so it is fair to ask what the granaries will hold this winter. No official estimate for 2026 has yet been released, and the figures below are my own projection, not the Agriculture Department’s. But the warning signs are clear enough to put numbers on.

Start with the baseline. In kharif 2025, Manipur brought 1,64,660 hectares under main-season paddy and produced an estimated 3,30,570 tonnes of clean rice. Adding the pre-kharif crop, the year’s total was 4,18,550 tonnes, at an average productivity of 2,399 kg per hectare, already below the national average of about 2,700 kg.

Now set this year’s season against it. In early July, transplanting had not begun in most valley fields, and stretches of foothill paddy land remained abandoned because of the continuing crisis. Much of the crop went into the ground only at the end of July, which means it is flowering and filling grain through the second half of October, exactly when nights turn cold. The August and September deficits came during tillering and panicle formation, and in Imphal East some farmers were pumping river water into their fields simply to keep the crop alive. Then, in mid-October, with the harvest days away, fall armyworm and brown planthopper attacks were reported across Imphal East, Imphal West, Thoubal and Bishnupur, with armyworms cutting spikelets from the panicles at night. Farmers who transplanted late were already expecting to lose more than half of their crop in August, before the pests arrived.

There are a few things on the other side of the ledger. July rain, though short of normal, did allow most fields to be planted in the end. More farmers are now growing short-duration varieties that can still mature before the cold. And the hills fared better than the valley: Senapati received normal rain in June and July, and Ukhrul was the only district with normal rain in August, so jhum and terrace rice there may hold up reasonably well.

Weighing these together, and using the 2022–23 collapse of 38 per cent as the closest comparison, I expect main-season rice output this year to fall by around 30 per cent, within a range of 20 to 40 per cent, depending on how badly the late-planted valley fields have suffered from cold and pests.

Author’s projection. Pre-kharif output assumed equal to 2025 (about 88,000 tonnes). Baseline from the Manipur Agriculture Department’s Annual Administration Report 2025–26.

In the most likely case, Manipur will produce roughly one lakh tonnes less rice this year than last. At the new support price of ₹2,441 per quintal for common paddy, the paddy behind that rice is worth upwards of ₹350 crore, money that will not reach farming households this winter. The loss will be uneven: valley farmers who transplanted late and lie close to the foothills will be hit hardest, while those with river or canal water, and many hill farmers, will come through with a near-normal crop. Prices of local rice, especially the aromatic and black(Chakhao) varieties the market prizes, are likely to rise from early next year, and the state will lean more heavily on rice brought in from outside.

If these numbers prove even roughly right, the case for declaring drought in the affected blocks is strong. The central drought manual, revised in 2016, already allows a declaration based not only on rainfall but on crop condition, soil moisture and sown area. Crop-cutting experiments should be carried out quickly and in the open, so that relief, input support and loan rescheduling reach tenants and sharecroppers as well as landowners.

Not only the sky’s fault

Honesty matters here. The fall in total rainfall cannot yet be statistically separated from the natural swings of El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole, and 2026 was clearly an El Niño year. But the warmer nights and the heavier bursts are exactly what global warming predicts, and Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh show similar declines. This year Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh were 60 and 44 per cent short, alongside our own 45. This is a regional signal, not a local accident.

What we do control is the ground beneath the rain. Imphal West alone has lost about 97 sq km of farmland in three decades, and built-up land in greater Imphal rose from 24 to 45 per cent between 1988 and 2021. The state lost 249 sq km of forest in just 2019–21. Jhum cycles have shortened on the hills. Since 1983, the Ithai barrage has held Loktak Lake at a fixed level, and siltation has cut its holding capacity by an estimated quarter. The Manipur Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act was passed in 2014 precisely to stop this drain, yet it has done little to slow the spread of concrete over prime paddy land.

The result is a landscape that can no longer absorb a storm or store a drop. The same rain now runs off faster, floods higher and leaves springs dry in the months that follow. Our biodiversity is paying too: between 12 and 20 native rice varieties have vanished from fields in about 15 years, and only 64 sangai have been confirmed in the wild.

What must change

The first task is immediate. With the soil still holding some moisture after harvest, farmers should be helped to sow rabi crops early, such as field pea, lentil and rapeseed-mustard, so that at least part of this year’s loss is recovered before spring. Seed, fertiliser and pest advisories for these crops need to reach villages in the next few weeks, not in January. Agricultural scientists should also run field campaigns on the safe control of armyworm and planthopper, so that farmers are not left buying pesticides blindly from the market.

Beyond this season, Manipur cannot order the clouds, but it can stop waiting on them. Irrigation canals, check dams and community ponds would free transplanting from the date the monsoon chooses to arrive; the existing major and medium irrigation projects must be made to deliver water to the fields they were built for. District-wise sowing calendars, built on IMD and CAU advisories, should reach every farmer before June, along with contingency plans: dapog nurseries, direct-seeded rice and short-duration varieties such as CAU’s roughly 100-day Mangal Phou for years when the rain comes late. Every district needs a community seed bank for native landraces, because they carry the drought, flood and cold tolerance our future crops will need.

Just as urgent is protecting what remains. That means framing and enforcing the rules of the 2014 paddy land and wetland law, zoning the Manipur Valley flood plain, keeping prime paddy land and wetlands out of the builder’s hands, restoring hill forests and longer jhum fallows, and reviewing how the Ithai barrage is run.

Our grandparents read the sky to know when to plant. Our children will have to read the data as well, and act on it. This winter’s thinner harvest is the bill for a single bad monsoon; the rain has changed its habits, and more such bills are coming. Whether Manipur changes its own habits is still our choice.

DR. RAJKUMAR RANJAN SINGH

The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of State External Affairs and Education, Government of India.