A 52-year analysis of India’s weather (1971–2022) identifies Odisha, on the eastern coast, as one of the country’s most pronounced drought hotspots, where the area under drought extremes rose by more than 20% per decade over 2011–2021.

•    Nationally, heat and drought extremes are spreading from isolated pockets into large, connected regions, with drought among the fastest-rising hazards.

•    The study calls for water and drought resilience to be the priority for eastern and southern India.

Bhubaneswar : A new national study tracking India’s weather from 1971 to 2022 finds that drought extremes are intensifying and spreading, and it singles out the eastern coastal states, Odisha among them, as the country’s most pronounced drought hotspots. For a state long defined by its exposure to cyclones and floods, the finding points to a second, slower-moving risk that is now firmly on the map.

The study, titled ‘Evolution of Climate Extremes Over the Indian Subcontinent Using a Revised CEI’ and published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Climatology by scientists at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), combined seven separate hazards, among them daytime heat, humid heat, heatwave severity and drought, into a single India Climate Extremes Index built on 52 years of IMD observations, with trends tested using the Mann-Kendall method.

Mapping how drought has shifted across the country, the study found that between 2011 and 2021 large areas of southern, central and northeastern India were under drought conditions more than 20% of the time per decade, a 20% to 30% increase in coverage compared with 1981–1991. The most pronounced hotspots, the authors write, lie along the eastern coastal states, and they name Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

“The eastern coast has always lived with cyclones and floods, but our fifty-year record shows drought becoming a defining risk here too. Odisha now sits among the country’s most pronounced drought hotspots, and that shift deserves as much planning attention as the coast’s storm risk.”

— M. Rajeevan, co-author, Atria University, Bengaluru

“When we mapped where drought has intensified, the eastern coastal belt stood out clearly. The area under drought there has grown by more than a fifth each decade over the last thirty years.”

— Thota Mohan, lead author, National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting

On the strength of the drought-hotspot finding, the study points to water and drought resilience as the priority for the eastern coast. The authors frame adaptation as cross-sectoral, spanning agriculture, water management, health and infrastructure, and caution that area-averaged figures can hide localised extremes, making the case for finer-scale, district-level monitoring. They propose the index as an operational tool that agencies can run each year to track where stress is building.

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