The IHDS Forum is a monthly update of socio-economic developments in India by the IHDS research community, based on the India Human Development Survey, jointly conducted by NCAER and the University of Maryland. While two earlier rounds of the survey were completed in 2004-05 and 2011-12, respectively. Fieldwork for the third round was undertaken in 2022-24 and the data is currently being cleaned and processed.
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Crop-specific yield assessment should be intensified in rain-fed districts. Tur, soybean and maize deserve particular attention.
India’s 2026 monsoon is becoming an increasing concern for the economy—not simply because rainfall is deficient, but because the deficit is highly uneven across regions and is concentrated in areas important for rain-fed agriculture.
Recent assessments indicate substantial shortfalls across several regions, with East and North India recording deficits of around 26 per cent below the long-period average, the South Peninsula around 23 per cent and the Northeast around 11 per cent. More importantly, large rain-fed areas of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Gujarat are facing significant rainfall stress. The implications for kharif production therefore deserve closer attention than the national rainfall number alone suggests.
The immediate concern is not necessarily a broad-based collapse in agricultural output. It is the possibility of crop-specific and region-specific yield losses, particularly in rain-fed crops such as tur, soybean and maize. These crops need close monitoring as the season progresses, with greater emphasis on actual yield prospects rather than simply acreage sown.
Price shocks
This distinction matters for food inflation. A moderate national rainfall deficit need not generate a major price shock if production in vulnerable crops remains adequate or if other regions compensate. But a concentrated production loss in pulses or oilseeds can quickly translate into higher prices because domestic supply is already relatively tight and imports may be required to bridge the gap.
India’s recent inflation numbers provide little room for complacency. Retail CPI inflation rose from 4.38 per cent in June to 4.45 per cent in July 2026, while food inflation was considerably higher at 5.52 per cent. Rural CPI inflation was also higher than urban inflation. A further weather-induced supply shock could therefore affect not only food prices but also the real purchasing power of rural households.
This creates a potentially uncomfortable chain in which a rainfall shock can lead to crop losses, lower farm incomes, higher food prices and, ultimately, weaker real consumption. The problem is particularly acute for farmers, who can be caught in a double squeeze—losing income as producers while simultaneously facing higher prices as consumers.
The strengthening El Niño adds to the uncertainty. The UK Met Office’s latest assessment of August 21 is unusually stark, describing the developing event as potentially the largest El Niño since the nineteenth century, with Niño 3.4 sea-surface temperatures forecast to exceed 3°C above normal. It also expects 2027 to replace 2024 as the warmest year on record globally.
This should not be interpreted as a deterministic forecast of India’s monsoon. The relationship between El Niño and the Indian monsoon is complex. But it does strengthen the case for preparing for continued rainfall variability during the remainder of the season.
Govt response
The government’s response should therefore move from monitoring rainfall to monitoring potential food-supply disruptions.
First, crop-specific yield assessment should be intensified in vulnerable rain-fed districts. Tur, soybean and maize deserve particular attention. Remote sensing, crop-cutting experiments and field-level agricultural intelligence can help identify emerging yield losses before they become visible in market prices.
Second, procurement, buffer stocks and import decisions should be aligned with these assessments. If a meaningful shortfall in pulses or other essential commodities begins to emerge, imports should be facilitated early rather than after domestic prices have already risen sharply.
Third, global supply chains need to be treated as part of India’s food-security infrastructure. Geopolitical tensions, shipping disruptions and bottlenecks can make an otherwise manageable domestic production shortfall more difficult to absorb. Port capacity, shipping availability, warehousing and inland logistics should therefore be monitored alongside crop conditions.
This is particularly important because food security today depends not only on how much India produces, but also on how quickly commodities can move from surplus locations or overseas markets to deficit regions.
The fourth priority should be protecting vulnerable farmers and rural purchasing power. Where rainfall stress threatens standing crops, contingency planning, moisture conservation and irrigation support can help limit losses. Where incomes are nevertheless affected, employment and social-protection measures can prevent a temporary agricultural shock from becoming a wider rural-demand shock.
The broader lesson is that the economic impact of a weak monsoon depends less on the headline rainfall deficit than on how effectively the economy absorbs it. India cannot control the monsoon or El Niño. It can, however, improve crop intelligence, act early on imports and stocks, strengthen logistics and protect vulnerable households.
The objective should be straightforward: identify a potential supply shortfall before it becomes a price shock. As rainfall becomes more erratic, a resilient food economy will depend not only on producing more, but on knowing earlier where production is likely to fall short—and ensuring that the supply chain can respond before the consumer feels the shock.
The writer is with NCAER, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.
What are the hopes and desires of young job seekers in urban India? In the summer of 2023, armed with a long list of questions, we set out to survey over 3,000 randomly sampled men and women, 24 years of age on average, and living in the middle-class residential areas of Delhi. Our interest lay in understanding their journey towards employment — whether they were currently working or looking for work, or were planning to start their job search soon. The answers we got opened a window into the aspirations of this generation.
Almost 70 per cent of respondents — more men than women — told us they were looking for a job opportunity that would put them on their ideal career path from the start, instead of settling for just any job. Their career goal was predominantly being in salaried or formal-sector employment. More women job seekers aspired to these salaried positions, while only 14 per cent of the women we interviewed preferred being self-employed. In contrast, more than a third of men wanted to start their own enterprises. Contrary to the dominant narrative of strong preference for public-sector salaried jobs, a comparable share of these men and women were looking for private-sector salaried jobs.
Let’s compare the above statistics with the occupational data from the PLFS in 2023. Less than 50 per cent of India’s urban workforce is in salaried jobs, a figure that is even lower for our age group of respondents — merely one in every three employed 24-year-old holds a salaried job. No more than 10 per cent of our urban workforce is in the public sector or government jobs, and only about 15 per cent are in the formal private sector. Of those working, 40 per cent are self-employed but an overwhelming majority of these are subsistence businesses that do not hire any worker and have an annual turnover of less than Rs 10 lakh. So what are the odds of one of our job seekers landing her preferred salaried job or establishing a unicorn? Undoubtedly, the odds are stacked against these aspirational men and women.
But even if the probability of getting their preferred job is low, could they obtain a job, even if not ideal, that could give them salaries they aspire to? We asked respondents about their salary expectations from a range of jobs — accounts keeper, teacher in primary school, data entry operator, hospital attendant or electrician. We estimate the deviation of these salary expectations from the actual earnings for these jobs in urban India in the PLFS. Our job seekers expect up to 40 per cent higher salary than actual earnings reported in the PLFS for the same occupation. Male job seekers, in particular, show greater over-optimism in salary expectations relative to women, expecting almost Rs 8,000 more per month than the actual average earnings for these jobs and Rs 8,500 more per month for salaried jobs. Altogether, salary expectations diverge from reality by more than 30 per cent. When we assess the job aspirations and expectations of job seekers who are below 25 years of age in our sample, we find that expectations are even more skewed – again, more so for young men than young women.
Are the youth in our cities simply out of touch with labour-market realities? There can be several reasons for these misalignments and high expectations — lack of information or misinformation and inexperience with the job market, to name a couple of obvious explanations. We tested one hypothesis — can information about real-world job opportunities and salaries correct these job-market misperceptions? So we set out to inform and expose a random subset of our 3,000 job seekers to the real world and re-surveyed both the informed and the non-informed a year later. Twelve months after receiving information, we find that providing accurate information about job opportunities significantly dampened job seekers’ labour-market expectations of landing their ideal job relative to those who were not informed. Men, in particular, were less likely to report that they were on their ideal career path. This disillusionment is accompanied by a decline in men’s job-search intensity. Thus, as preferred job offers fail to materialise, job seekers adjust their expectations downwards and either remain in the same jobs or drop out of the labour market and enrol at educational institutions.
Not surprisingly, correct information seems to have made the job seekers realise that their expectations were too high. But did it also change the aspirations of these job seekers? The answer is a clear “no”. Perhaps it is not surprising that the aspirations did not change. These men and women continue to aim for formal-sector jobs or to become dynamic entrepreneurs a year after, because aspirations are long-term goals and not easily malleable. Our job seekers are willing to bide their time. Add to these aspirations the rising cost of good-quality education – more likely to be accessed through private educational institutions – then their job-market expectations are not just aspirational but necessary to recover the high cost of education.
The writer is professor of Economics, ISI (Delhi), and visiting professor, NCAER. Views are personal.
Globally and in India, the platform economy has emerged as a rapidly growing engine of employment. However, women are under-represented within this sector. The flexibility of platform work appeals to women balancing household and care responsibilities, but their participation remains constrained by gaps in skills and digital literacy, mobility and safety concerns, and restrictive social norms. A further constraint that receives comparatively little attention, yet profoundly limits women’s ability to enter, remain and advance in the platform economy is their systemic exclusion from formal financial services. Lacking verifiable income records and conventional collateral, women struggle to access the capital and financial security required to participate in this emerging economy.