Climate-Resilient Food Security in India: Challenges & Way Forward

Subject: GS Paper 3: Agriculture 

Context: Climate change is increasingly disrupting food production, storage, supply chains, and access to nutrition, necessitating a shift towards sustainable and climate-resilient food security. 

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India’s Existing Strengths

• Foodgrain Production: India produced over 350 million tonnes of foodgrains in 2024–25, including record rice and wheat production.
• National Food Security Act, 2013: Provides legal entitlement to subsidised foodgrains for around 800 million people.
• Public Distribution System: Provides an established mechanism for the delivery of foodgrains to vulnerable households.
• One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC): Enables portability of foodgrain entitlements, particularly benefiting migrant beneficiaries.
• Buffer Stocks: Provide a cushion against production shocks and food-price volatility.

Need for Climate-Proofing of Agriculture

• Production Risk: Rising temperatures and heat stress can reduce crop yields and livestock productivity.
• Water Stress: Erratic rainfall, droughts and groundwater depletion threaten irrigation reliability and farm productivity.
• Infrastructure Risk: Floods, cyclones, and other extreme events can damage crops, storage facilities, roads, and transport networks.
• Price Volatility: Climate-induced supply shocks can trigger food-price spikes and market instability.
• Nutritional Security: Production losses can reduce the availability, affordability, and diversity of nutritious food.
• Resilience Imperative: Food security must move beyond food availability towards a system that is stable, affordable, nutritious and climate-resilient.

Key Challenges in Climate-Proofing India’s Food System

• Rice–Wheat Concentration: Heavy dependence on rice and wheat procurement and a limited number of regions create systemic risk when these crops face climate stress.
• Water-Intensive Cropping: Procurement incentives can reinforce rice–wheat cultivation in groundwater-stressed regions, weakening long-term water resilience.
• Limited Dietary Diversification: Cereals dominate procurement and distribution, constraining the institutional space for pulses, millets and other nutritious foods.
• Supply-Chain Vulnerability: Climate extremes can damage warehouses, storage, roads, and transport networks, disrupting the movement of food.
• Weak Climate Integration: Climate forecasts and risk information are not yet fully integrated into procurement, buffer-stock management and food-security planning.
• Uneven Risk Protection: Small farmers and climate-vulnerable regions remain exposed to production and income losses from extreme weather

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What Needs to Change?

• Diversify Public Procurement: Expand procurement of millets, pulses, oilseeds, and other nutritious cereals.
  • Diversify procurement across regions and agro-climatic zones according to local water and climate conditions.
  • Align price support with crops suited to local natural-resource conditions.
• Integrate Climate Information: Link India Meteorological Department forecasts with procurement, buffer-stock management and contingency planning.
  • Include heat stress, water stress, and storage vulnerability in food-security monitoring.
  • Provide farmers with timely climate advisories and risk-management tools.
• Strengthen Climate-Resilient Agriculture: Promote climate-resilient seed varieties suited to heat and rainfall variability.
  • Expand micro-irrigation and watershed development for better water management.
  • Encourage precision farming for efficient use of water and agricultural inputs.
  • Strengthen digital agricultural advisories for climate-informed decisions.
  • Expand weather-indexed insurance to reduce farmers’ climate-related risks.
• Climate-Proof the Food Supply Chain: Develop flood-resilient warehouses to protect food stocks.
  • Upgrade storage systems to withstand higher temperatures.
  • Expand cold-chain infrastructure to reduce losses of perishable commodities.
• Mobilise Climate Finance: Mobilise green bonds and adaptation finance for climate-resilient food systems.
  • Expand insurance coverage against climate-related agricultural risks.
  • Invest in resilient agricultural value chains that cover production, storage, and distribution.
  • Integrate food-system resilience with India’s net-zero pathway.

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