India’s farm crisis is fundamentally about climate change. Extreme weather, not just pricing or policy failures, now reshapes agriculture more rapidly than traditional frameworks respond. Yet public debate remains trapped in MSPs and subsidies, missing that climate change is the driving force behind the crisis. The Heat Is Already Doing the Damage India lost somewhere […]

India lost somewhere between 15% and 25% of wheat yields in heatwave-affected areas in recent years. In the worst-hit districts during 2025, farmers reported a significant drop in their yields, not because of bad seeds or poor technique, but because extreme temperatures during grain filling simply cooked the crop before harvest. Each 1-degree increase leads to a national average yield loss of about 8 per cent.

This is not a future projection. It is last season’s reality, repeated and worsening. And the projections for what comes next are genuinely alarming. Without serious adaptation measures, rainfed rice yields could fall by 20% by 2050 and nearly 47% by 2080.