2025, the year when the weather stopped making sense in India

The trouble began in February 2025, when winter ended too soon. Schools in New Delhi dismissed children early, not for a holiday but because temperatures were soaring during what should have been the cooler weeks of the year. Parks lay empty under an unseasonable sun. The capital was sweating in its woollens.

This wasn’t an anomaly. It was the opening act of a year that would shatter every assumption about normal weather in India.

By the time November arrived, the picture was complete. Between January and November, India experienced extreme weather on 331 out of 334 days. Heat gave way to floods gave way to cold waves gave way to more floods in a relentless sequence that left no time for recovery.

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The familiar rhythm of seasons, the predictable turn from summer to monsoon to winter, simply stopped. What replaced it was a state of permanent emergency.

Ledger of loss

The numbers tell a story of impact and loss that India has seldom seen in recent times. At least 4,419 people died from extreme weather events. Crops were destroyed across 17.4 million hectares, an area larger than Nepal. More than 1,81,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. The monsoon became a 122-day siege rather than a season of renewal.

But the real signature of 2025 was the collapse of timing. February became the hottest in 124 years. In November, 13 states were gripped by unseasonal cold waves. For the third year running, every single one of India’s 36 states and Union territories reported extreme weather damage. No place was spared.

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Some regions were badly pummelled. Himachal Pradesh, with its fragile mountain terrain, endured extreme weather on 80 per cent of the days in the year. On the plains, Maharashtra saw 8.4 million hectares of cropland ruined — a mind-numbing scale of agricultural destruction.

One after the other

The year’s weather shocks came in waves, each disaster distinct but connected to the same climate chaos. August brought what Punjab had not seen in four decades. The worst floods since 1988 submerged 1,400 villages across several districts. Intense monsoon rains in the mountains, combined with poorly timed water releases from major dams, turned India’s breadbasket into a vast lake. Over 4,00,000 people were affected.

The same month, cloudbursts in Uttarakhand’s Dharali region triggered flash floods that washed away homes and infrastructure, leaving dozens dead or missing. Days later, another cloudburst struck a pilgrimage site in Kishtwar, Jammu and Kashmir, sweeping away the base camp and causing heavy casualties.

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November closed the year with Cyclone Ditwah, which triggered severe rains and fierce winds in Tamil Nadu. Chennai saw extensive flooding that affected transport, schools and offices for days. This was no longer about bouncing back from one big storm. It was a continuous erosion of the country’s economic and social foundation.

Planetary pattern

India’s climate crisis was part of a global pattern. While India baked months ahead of schedule, other regions drowned. Cyclones Ditwah and Senyar killed more than 1,600 people across South and Southeast Asia in late November, their intensity supercharged by record ocean temperatures.

In the Caribbean, Hurricane Melissa exploded into a Category-5 storm, the strongest anywhere in the world in 2025, causing catastrophic damage when it struck Jamaica. Meanwhile, Iraq recorded its driest year since 1933, part of a five-year drought strangling the entire region — from Iran to Syria.

The economic toll is staggering. One independent analysis found that climate change caused a 66 per cent loss in India’s agriculture sector last year, a direct assault on livelihoods for nearly half the population.

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The human displacement tells its own story. Between 2015 and 2024, climate disasters displaced more than 32 million Indians. In 2024 alone, over five million people were forced from their homes. These are families who have become refugees in their own country.

Paradox of policy

Here is where the story turns grim. At the international climate summit held in November in Brazil, India’s environment minister delivered a forceful message. He argued that the conference must look at climate adaptation and demanded that wealthy nations dramatically increase funding to help vulnerable countries build resilience.

The speech matched the devastation unfolding back home. It was passionate advocacy on the world stage. Yet the government’s actions at home told a different story.

India’s primary domestic fund for building climate resilience, called the National Adaptation Fund on Climate Change, received a zero-rupee allocation for the second year in a row. Meant to finance projects from drought-proofing villages to climate-proofing infrastructure, the fund has been effectively dead since 2023.

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The omission was symbolic. The words “climate change” and “adaptation” were absent from the Union Budget 2025 speech entirely, analysts noted. This contradiction has not escaped scrutiny.

Climate Action Tracker rates India’s overall climate targets as “highly insufficient” to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius. The tracker rated India’s current policies as insufficient. The core issue is coal, which still powers roughly 75 per cent of India’s electricity.

While renewable capacity is growing in the country, it is not replacing fossil fuels fast enough. The gap between the accelerating crisis and the pace of response is where people are dying and livelihoods are vanishing.

Innovation in the cracks

In the vacuum left by slow-moving government institutions, some groups of people have acted sensibly. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) launched pioneering heat insurance in 2024 and scaled it in 2025. When temperatures soar past 40 degrees Celsius, more than 50,000 women working as street vendors, waste recyclers and labourers receive a small cash payment on their phones.

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This isn’t charity. It’s a survival tool that lets a woman choose to stay home during a lethal heatwave without her family going hungry. The government is also slowly drafting India’s first National Adaptation Plan with UN support. It is intended to be a comprehensive survival strategy. But a plan without money is just words on paper.

The global need is astronomical. A 2025 UN report found that developing countries need up to USD 365 billion a year for adaptation by 2035. Right now, they receive less than a twelfth of that. India’s empty adaptation fund is a perfect, painful symbol of this failure.

Questions 2026 must answer

The shattered year of 2025 has left India with hard questions. The first is about political will. Will the next budget restore funding to the national adaptation fund? Anything less is an admission that combating adaptation is rhetoric, not reality.

Second, can local genius be scaled? Models like heat insurance work. The challenge is whether governments, at the Centre and the states, will have the vision to protect millions, not just thousands.

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The biggest question is the most difficult. Researchers warn that by 2050, climate impacts could force about 45 million Indians to migrate within the country. The millions displaced in recent years are just a preview. Is any ministry planning for this? Which cities will absorb them? How will they live?

The new battle

These are no longer environmental questions. They are fundamental questions of national planning, social stability and survival. The time for preventing climate change has passed. That battle was lost in decades of talk and delay.

The new battle, harder and more urgent, is for resilience. It is the fight to build a nation that can endure the relentless pounding that has now begun due to climate change. The year 2025 was when the warning sirens became a constant, deafening shriek. The year 2026 must be when India finally starts to listen, and starts to act.