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Kuldeep Singh and N Anandkumar Singh
Every monsoon season, an uninviting ritual plays out across Northeast India. Rivers breach their banks. Paddy fields disappear under brown water. Hillsides give way. And somewhere in Manipur, Nagaland, or Assam, a farmer who spent months tending to a crop watches it vanish in hours, receiving, if lucky, two kilograms of rice from the government in relief. This is not a story about nature's fury. It is a story about policy failure dressed up as a natural disaster.
The Numbers Behind the Silence: The data is damning, if anyone cares to look at it. More than 60 per cent of cultivated land in Northeast India depends on rain-fed agriculture, making it uniquely exposed to every shift in rainfall patterns. Several studies indicate that rice and maize yields decline by 5–10 per cent and 3–8 per cent respectively for every single degree Celsius rise in temperature.
Nationally, rainfed rice yields are projected to fall by 20 per cent by 2050 in the absence of adaptation measures and the Northeast, with its fragile hill terrain and subsistence-farming communities, will absorb the worst of that blow. The recent record is sobering. In June 2025, floods in Manipur affected over 1.6 lakh people, damaged 35,000 houses across 643 localities, triggered 169 landslides, and wiped out 162 hectares of crops in a matter of days. One resident of Thambalkhong, flooded for the third time in as many years in 2024, June 2025, and again in September 2025 described receiving just two kilograms of rice across three catastrophic floods. In Nagaland's Phek district, flash floods in Zhavame village destroyed hundreds of hectares of paddy fields, devastating the food security of over 40 households in a single stroke. In Tuensang, landslides in 2024 damaged or destroyed 378 homes and displaced over 750 people. These are not anomalies. They are the new annual average.
Why This Matters Now: Northeast India sits at a dangerous climatic crossroads. The region is significantly influenced by the southwest monsoon, and despite relatively stable long-term precipitation trends, it is experiencing increasingly intense extreme weather events heavier downpours concentrated in shorter windows, followed by dry spells that crack the same soil that was flooded weeks before. The Himalayas are warming faster than the global average, disrupting crop cycles and increasing erosion and pest pressure. Extreme weather events in India now occur on roughly 90 per cent of days between January and September, according to the Centre for Science and Environment. For the hill farmers of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and Meghalaya, this is not a future projection. It is already here. And unlike farmers in the plains who may have irrigation buffers, credit access, or crop insurance, the small and marginal farmers of the Northeast the overwhelming majority farm on steep slopes, without irrigation, without formal market access, and without meaningful safety nets. The economic consequences ripple outward. Smallholder income losses drive debt. Debt drives distress migration. Blocked national highways like the NH-2 cut off by a 25-metre landslide near Phesama in June 2025 isolate communities, drive up the cost of food and fuel, and compound every other vulnerability. Climate change is now also a documented driver of food price inflation, with researchers from the Potsdam Institute and the RBI both flagging it as a macroeconomic concern. And yet, the political response remains stubbornly reactive: relief camps after flooding, temporary embankment repairs after breaches, promises of committees and studies that rarely survive the return of dry weather.
The Policy Gap: The central government's National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) exists on paper. Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) are being set up 10,000 across India by early 2025. But these initiatives are designed largely around the agricultural realities of the Gangetic plains, not the rain-fed, shifting-cultivation, terrace-farming realities of Northeast India. Manipur did not even qualify for the central flood assistance package announced in the 2024 budget, despite suffering what residents described as one of the worst floods in living memory. The High Court of Manipur has had to take suo-motu cognisance of recurring floods and file a PIL against the state and 40 respondents a judicial intervention prompted by the failure of executive governance. Meanwhile, deforestation in upper river basins continues, reducing natural water retention. Urbanisation encroaches on floodplains. Drainage infrastructure in Imphal and other valley towns is decades old, built for a smaller population. Natural streams are blocked or built over. When rain falls heavily and it falls more heavily now there is simply nowhere for the water to go except into paddy fields and living rooms.
What Needs to Happen: The path forward requires structural commitment, not seasonal sympathy. First, the central and state governments must establish a Northeast-specific Climate-Resilient Agriculture Fund, ring-fenced from general NMSA allocations, tailored to the unique challenges of hill and rain-fed farming in the region. This fund should prioritise community seed banks with climate-adapted crop varieties, slope-stabilisation and terracing support, and farmer-level weather advisory systems linked to the India Meteorological Department. Second, flood management must shift from emergency response to watershed governance. This means legally binding deforestation limits in upper catchment areas, mandatory environmental impact assessments for all hill road construction, and real investment in early-warning systems and flood-plain zoning not just relief camps. Third, crop insurance must be made genuinely accessible in the Northeast. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana has low uptake in the region because its design assumes land records, bank accounts, and administrative infrastructure that many hill communities lack. Simplified, community-based insurance models need to be piloted urgently. Finally, disaster relief criteria at the centre must be reformed to reflect the Northeast's unique vulnerability. A state can be simultaneously underdeveloped, geographically isolated, and climate-exposed and still fall through the cracks of assistance formulae designed for more legible catastrophes.
The Farmer Who Cannot Wait: The farmer standing in his flooded paddy field in Phek or Thambalkhong is not asking for a climate summit. He is asking whether the embankment will hold next year.
Whether the road will open before his harvest rots or whether the government will remember him when the water recedes. For too long, Northeast India has been treated as a peripheral concern in national climate and agricultural policy its farmers too small, its states too remote, its disasters too routine to demand sustained attention. But the region is on the sharpest edge of a crisis that will only deepen. The rain is not going to become more predictable. The question is whether the policy will.
@The authors are from College of Postgraduate studies in Agricultural Sciences, CAU-Imphal
