To Make Climate Adaptation Work, India Must Invest in Institutions

Indian agriculture is increasingly exposed to climate risks, making climate adaptation an urgent priority. Strategies like climate-resilient varieties, crop diversification, conservation agriculture, micro-irrigation, water harvesting, agroforestry and crop insurance are being promoted across the country. These strategies work, but only where they fit local conditions. Besides choosing the right strategy, scaling such initiatives requires institutions that can coordinate, sustain and connect adaptation across sectors and existing policies. 

The scale of this challenge is stark. Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) classified 573 of India’s 802 districts as predominantly climate vulnerable. Out of them, 109 are “very highly vulnerable”, and 201 are “highly vulnerable”. Because vulnerability arises from distinct combinations of climatic, ecological and socioeconomic risks, and given India’s diverse context, what works in one agro-climatic region may not work in another. 

But adaptation cannot reach its full potential through individual farms or isolated pilot projects. Droughts, floods, erratic rainfall, heatwaves, cyclones, and landslides do not respect administrative or sectoral boundaries. Adaptation must therefore be planned at the landscape level, i.e. a shared geographic and ecological unit, such as a watershed, village cluster or agro-climatic zone, within which farms, water, forests and communities are interlinked and must be managed together.  

Local interventions

Adaptation is fundamentally a local phenomenon. The same drought or heatwave plays out differently across villages or watersheds, requiring locally tailored responses. Science-based adaptation strategies such as climate information, improved varieties and technical know-how do not translate into local action on their own. That depends on collective agency, i.e. farmers and communities making shared decisions about managing risks and land and water resources. Collective agency requires sustained support and coordination, which local institutions provide.

Also Read: The Goan meal is changing, one ingredient at a time

Consider a farmer in rainfed and drought-prone regions of western India. They can adopt drought-tolerant seed varieties or measures to improve irrigation efficiency. This is helpful but not sufficient to manage a prolonged dry spell. Their ability to survive a drought depends on how water is harvested, stored, managed, whether cropping choices match the water available across the landscape, and whether local institutions can coordinate access to shared resources.  This requires farmers, communities and institutions working together to manage shared resources. 

India has invested considerably in effective adaptation strategies, but the missing link lies in the institutional capacity to ensure that the right strategies reach the landscapes and are implemented and sustained at scale. 

Landscape-level adaptation depends on coordination across several sectors and convergence across existing government schemes and departments. As this involves collective benefits and long-term investment, markets alone cannot deliver it. The private sector can supply technologies, services and finance, but cannot substitute for public institutions that plan across landscapes. More public investment is needed in institutions that are collective and locally embedded in nature, like farmer producer organisations, self-help groups (SHGs) and water-user groups. 

Also Read: At Bonn Conference, Farmers’ Warn of Double Crisis Threatening Food Security

India already has examples of this model working in the form of institutionally supported programmes. They include the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) and Kudumbashree in Kerala.

Utilising existing institutions

Self-help groups (SHGs) trace their roots to SEWA, founded in Gujarat in 1972 to organise women in the unorganised sector. NGOs helped spread them in the 1980s as savings groups offering rural women low-cost credit. In 1996, Andhra Pradesh piloted the model in three districts under the UNDP-supported South Asian Poverty Alleviation Programme (SAPAP), demonstrating how collective action could complement panchayati raj institutions.

Political will and committed bureaucrats led to the model’s institutionalisation under the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) in 2000. In 2004, a new government expanded it as Indira Kranthi Patham, demonstrating rare bipartisan continuity.

Groups of 10–15 women were organised into village organisations, block-level Mahila Samakhyas and district-level Zila Samakhyas. This federation gave SHGs stability and collective agency, helping them expand beyond microfinance into agricultural marketing, non-pesticide management and access to government schemes.

Also Read: How Climate Change is Eroding India's Biocultural Heritage

That network is what let the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) Program scale. Launched in 2016 as an alternative to chemical-intensive agriculture, APCNF aims to reduce the net cost of production by minimizing external inputs and substituting chemical inputs for natural ones, and relies on SHGs as its dissemination backbone through community mobilisation. Beyond promoting the package of practices, the SHGs also engage in knowledge sharing, collaborative preparation of inputs, financial empowerment, and advocacy for nutrition gardens to improve food and nutritional security. Hence, a collective that began as economic and social security for rural poor became the institutional anchor for APCNF.

Kudumbashree followed a similar logic in Kerala. Launched as the State Poverty Eradication Mission in 1998, the women’s collective involving financial inclusion, built a decentralized network of development - Neighbourhood Groups (NHGs) at the village level, Area Development Societies (ADSs) at the ward level, and Community Development Societies (CDSs) at the municipal level. Through the network, communities could articulate local priorities and engage with the institutions of the government. This systematic network of bottom to top engagement gathered further steam through the tenures of Left Democratic Front (LDF) as well as the United Democratic Front (UDF) governments that supported its expansion to several other sectors like microfinance, livelihoods, agriculture, collective farming, and social protection to name a few. 

Collective action

The lesson from both cases is the same: successful collective action at scale depends on long-term, non-partisan institutional support, not on any single scheme or funding cycle. Both state governments invested in locally embedded institutions suited to local context, and sustained their support through changes in government. This kind of investment is largely missing from most other social development programmes in the country.

A decentralised base built on the existing community networks makes it easier to introduce and scale new schemes. Both APCNF and Kudumbashree expanded into new sectors by building on the existing SHG network - a multiplier effect that other adaptation programmes could utilise, rather than building parallel structures from scratch.

For climate adaptation, the implication is clear: collective action cannot be built through standalone projects or as a line item within them. SERP and SAPAP show what this looks like: dedicated financing that lets institutions grow from the village level up, and gives them a voice and agency. Without that kind of investment, adaptation strategies will keep failing to scale, not for lack of good ideas, but for lack of the institutions to carry them. If India is serious about climate adaptation, the challenge is not simply to spend more, but to invest – deliberately, and for the long term — in the institutions that can make collective action work at scale.

 

Dr Upasna Sharma is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi. Dyuti Garg is a consultant on climate adaptation in agriculture at IIT Delhi. Dr Sudeshna Datta is a senior project scientist at Centre of Excellence for Climate Change Adaptation, IIT Delhi. Abhilasha Singh is a doctoral researcher at the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi. Views expressed are personal.

 

[Edit: Bhasker Tripathi, Shaswata Kundu Chaudhuri; Production: Arkatapa Basu]