El Niño is not just a weather headline. For a state where most of the sown area is rainfed, a warming Pacific means a monsoon that arrives late, delivers less, and leaves long dry spells in the middle — along with heat stress, pest outbreaks, and fodder and water shortages. The signal is the same everywhere; the damage is not. It lands hardest on rainfed dryland districts — Rayalaseema and southern Telangana especially — and the difference between a hard season and a ruinous one is mostly made before the crop goes in.
That is the case for contingency planning, and this season it is not optional. To support it, CSA has put two resources together.
A manual that turns delay into decisions. The Drought Contingency Planning Manual for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is a decision-support reference for extension staff and FPOs. Its core idea is simple: replace the vague feeling that “it hasn’t rained” with a clear, named condition that triggers a specific action. A week’s delay means hold your seed and watch the forecast. Around two to three weeks in, you switch to a shorter-duration variety of the same crop. Past a month, you change the crop entirely. Past six weeks, on shallow soils, you move to millets or a fodder-only plan. At two months, you call a crop holiday on that plot, protect the soil cover, and start planning Rabi. The manual carries this logic across the main crop groups — paddy, cotton, pulses, oilseeds and millets — maps it onto the real agro-climatic zones of the two states, and lays out decision trees for rainfed land and for canal-command land, which fail in different ways and need different responses.
An advisory you can follow through the season. Where the manual is the reference, CSA’s El Niño Advisory Technical Note is the how-to. It organises the year into four phases, each with its own actions:
- Pre-season: choose short-duration and drought-tolerant varieties, activate community seed banks, repair water-harvesting structures, plan fodder, and enrol in crop insurance.
- In-season: read the weekly forecast for your area, check the crop stand at 21 days and gap-fill if needed, schedule supplementary irrigation from farm ponds, watch for pests, and conserve moisture through mulching and tied ridges.
- Extreme event: rescue the crop with deficit irrigation and foliar nutrition, protect livestock with emergency fodder, water and heat management, and help households access MGNREGA and PDS support.
- Recovery: build the Rabi plan around the moisture the soil still holds, restore soil health with cover crops and compost, and rebuild livestock herds.
We are mid-kharif now, under stress, which puts the in-season and recovery phases front and centre — protect what’s standing, and plan Rabi on residual moisture rather than gambling on late rain.
A word on honest use. The manual is a foundation layer, and it says so plainly: the specific variety names in it are drawn from older district contingency plans and should be checked against PJTSAU’s and ANGRAU’s current-season release lists before they reach any farmer. Use it for the decision logic and the timing; confirm the names locally. The strength of both documents is that they are sourced, and clear about what is solidly evidenced and what still needs local validation.
The larger point running through both is the one Digital Farm School keeps returning to: resilience is built before the shock, not during it. A repaired farm pond, a stocked seed bank, a short-duration variety on hand, a little fodder put by — these are the cheap insurance that decides how an El Niño year ends.
Read and download the Drought Contingency Planning Manual and the El Niño Advisory here.
https://csa-india.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/260622-ElNino_Advisory_Technical_Note_3.0.pdf
https://csa-india.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/260709-Drought-Contingency-Plan.pdf
