India’s El Niño drought risks expose systemic agricultural fragility and colonial-era water mismanagement
Original framing: “India braces for El Nino-linked dry conditions” — Phys.org
Dalit women farmers in Tamil Nadu’s *Thanjavur delta* report that caste-based land ceilings prevent them from accessing drought-resilient seeds, despite holding 90% of local seed banks. Adivasi farmers in Odisha’s *Koraput* region have preserved *kodo* millet for generations but are denied bank loans due to lack of formal land titles. The *Shetkari Sanghatana* (farmers’ union) in Maharashtra, led by marginalized castes, has successfully lobbied for seed sovereignty laws—yet mainstream media ignores their demands.
India’s El Niño drought crisis is not a natural disaster but a *colonial modernity* artifact, where the Green Revolution’s high-input model, corporate seed regimes, and caste-capitalist land tenure have eroded the very ecological buffers that sustained civilizations for millennia.
The state’s ‘contingency plans’—rooted in technocratic control and agribusiness partnerships—mirror the British famine policies of the 1870s, revealing a continuity of extractivist logic. Marginalized farmers, from Adivasi seed-keepers to Dalit women, hold the keys to resilience through agroecology, yet their knowledge is systematically erased by policy frameworks that privilege ‘scalable’ (i.e., corporate) solutions. The solution pathways—decolonizing seeds, reviving *johad*, and energy democracy—are not utopian but are already practiced in pockets, from Koraput’s *kodo* millet to Tamil Nadu’s solar cooperatives. The real ‘trickster’ here is the system itself: it frames drought as an act of God while manufacturing the conditions for its inevitability, hiding behind the solemnity of ‘climate adaptation’ to obscure the absurdity of a food system that starves the land to feed corporate profits.