Andhra Pradesh farmers caught between climate uncertainty and financial risk

By late August, the earth in Inagallu village of Bapatla district should be shimmering with the emerald green of young paddy shoots. Instead, Kommineni Srinivasa Rao walks across a vast expanse of hard, cracked soil where his plough refuses to bite. For Srinivasa Rao, who owns four acres of land and leases six others, the 2026 monsoon has been a harsh reality check. His days are now an anxious vigil under a cloudless sky, leaving him apprehensive about spending his last borrowed funds — a final gamble on a harvest that may never yield a single grain. Across Andhra Pradesh, Srinivasa Rao’s nightmare is repeating on a mass scale, turning a routine agricultural season into a desperate financial survival test because of water scarcity, shrinking or delayed crop coverage, and relentlessly rising cultivation costs.