How climate change affects India’s wheat production Premium

Wheat needs a cooler season to grow, and the crop is usually sown between October and December, and harvested between February and April in the Rabi crop season.

India recorded its warmest February in 124 years this year. The India Meteorological Department has already raised an alarm for March, saying that the month will experience above normal temperatures and more than the usual number of days with heat waves. The period coincides with the beginning of India’s wheat harvest season, and extreme heat poses a grave threat for the country’s second-most consumed crop, after rice.

In India, wheat is primarily grown in the northwestern parts of the Indo-Gangetic plains. Primary producers include the States of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, and Madhya Pradesh. Wheat needs a cooler season to grow, and the crop is usually sown between October and December. It is harvested between February and April in the rabi crop season.

The Indian government set a wheat procurement target of 30 million tonnes for the 2025-2026 rabi marketing season, news agency PTIreported in January. The lower procurement target comes despite the agriculture ministry aiming for a record wheat production of 115 million tonnes in the 2024-2025 crop year (July-June), the report added.

In 2024-2025, government wheat procurement was recorded at 26.6 million tonnes. While this exceeded the 26.2 million tonnes procured in 2023-2024, it fell short of the 34.15 million tonne target for the year.

In May 2022, India had prohibited wheat exports. This was shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, a major wheat-producing country, which disrupted international availability of the food grain and triggered a global price hike.

Climate variability itself is not a new phenomenon, but it catches our attention when the crop growth season overlaps with heat wave conditions, Sandeep Mahato of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, told The Hindu.

A 2022 study in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences noted that increasing global warming is causing heat stress that “triggers significant changes in the biological and developmental process of wheat, leading to a reduction in grain production and grain quality”.