Andhra Pradesh farmers caught between climate uncertainty and financial risk

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Amid severe El Niño-induced monsoon deficits and looming drought, farmers in Andhra Pradesh resort to laying temporary PVC pipelines across dry fields to draw distant ground water and irrigate the soil ahead of sowing. | Photo Credit: K.V.S Giri

By late August, the earth in Inagallu village of Bapatla district should be shimmering with the emerald green of young paddy shoots. Instead, Kommineni Srinivasa Rao walks across a vast expanse of hard, cracked soil where his plough refuses to bite. For Srinivasa Rao, who owns four acres of land and leases six others, the 2026 monsoon has been a harsh reality check. His days are now an anxious vigil under a cloudless sky, leaving him apprehensive about spending his last borrowed funds — a final gamble on a harvest that may never yield a single grain. Across Andhra Pradesh, Srinivasa Rao’s nightmare is repeating on a mass scale, turning a routine agricultural season into a desperate financial survival test because of water scarcity, shrinking or delayed crop coverage, and relentlessly rising cultivation costs.

For thousands of farming families across the State, the primary worry is no longer about which crop will fetch a good price in the market. Instead, the questions are whether they can plant anything at all? What crops can survive with dwindling water supply? Or whether their harvests will ever cover their mounting debts?

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