Same Deficit as 2015, a Different Map: How El Niño Redrew India's 2026 Monsoon

The Deficit Repeated

1. The Map Did Not. In 2015, India's southwest monsoon closed at 758.2 mm. In 2026 it closed at 759.4 mm, a difference of just over a millimetre across four months and an entire subcontinent. Both were El Niño years and both produced a weak season.

On the national ledger, 2026 looks almost like a rerun. This has happened before. El Niño shaped India's bad monsoon years in 2002, 2009, 2014 and 2015 and each time the all-India total was the headline. This year, though, the all-India total is the least informative number.

The real record was regional. East and northeast India, the belt that has always served as the country's rain reservoir, received 1,017.1 mm, its driest monsoon since the IMD's records begin in 1901. That is where the parallel with 2015 breaks. If 2026 is the driest season on record for the region, then 2015 must have been wetter there, even though its national figure was almost identical.

The shortfall was the same size, but it fell on a different part of the country.

A Season Broken in Time The deficit was not spread evenly across the months either:

• June: 65% of LPA, a stalled start -

July: 101%, a fully normal month -

August: 84%, a second collapse -

September: 92%, a partial recovery Read in sequence, this was not a uniformly weak monsoon. It stalled, revived and stalled again. The seasonal figure of 87% of LPA is an average of months that never behaved like 87% on their own.

Two Patterns Meeting

The east-northeast record matters because IMD Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra noted a marked trend of declining rainfall in the region in recent years. So 2026 is where two different kinds of recurrence met:

• A cyclical pattern: El Niño years that periodically suppress the monsoon across India.
• A longer drift: a region whose rainfall has been thinning in recent years, independent of the El Niño cycle. When a cyclical dip lands on a declining baseline, the result is more than a bad year. It sets a new floor. The southern peninsula also suffered, at 76% of its LPA, but its shortfall looks like a familiar El Niño year. The east-northeast's shortfall is a record. There is an irony here. A 2014 UPSC question asked why the Green Revolution bypassed eastern India despite good availability of water. The exam treated water abundance in the east as a given. Even this year's record low of 1,017.1 mm is well above the all-India figure of 759.4 mm, so the east is still wetter than the country as a whole. But "wetter than average" is not the same as "reliably abundant," and planning built on the second assumption is now under strain. The lesson for the exam is about method. An all-India percentage tells you how much rain fell. Only the regional and monthly breakdown tells you what the monsoon actually did.