On the bed of the Ken River in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district this June, farmers were growing vegetables in the exposed silt, running portable pumps into the last shrinking pools to keep the crop alive through the summer heat. A year ago, the same stretch of riverbed sat several feet underwater. Bundelkhand, the drought-prone plateau spanning 13 districts of the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, officially home to 18.3 million people, swung from a historic flood in July 2025 to a drought warning by the summer of 2026. Meteorologists now expect a strong El Niño to keep the region dry for the rest of the year.
Amid this environmental distress, the people of Bundelkhand have been in a battle against the Indian state to protect their lands and their ways of life, failing which they want fair compensation. On 5 April, thousands of villagers facing displacement by the Ken-Betwa Link Project, an ambitious river-linking project that authorities say will supply irrigation,drinking water and electricity to large swathes of Bundelkhand, gathered in protest at the construction site of the Daudhan Dam, the project’s central component. Many of them were from the Gond and Kol tribal communities, with generational ties to the land. The women staged a chita andolan by lying on mock funeral pyres, and waded into the Barna River wearing nooses to signal that the project would annihilate their communities. A farmer leader, Amit Bhatnagar, spent close to two weeks on hunger strike. Officials promised a fresh survey to decide on the compensation due to those affected. The protests paused briefly, then resumed in mid-July, before the police forcefully dispersed the demonstrators on 19 July.
Bundelkhand has long endured weather whiplash. Last year’s numbers show how extreme the swings can be. Madhya Pradesh’s Tikamgarh district, where the seasonal rainfall is normally around 268 millimetres, received 835 millimetres of rain in mid-July 2025 – a 212-percent surplus. Niwari district recorded 805 millimetres against a normal of 194 – a 315-percent surplus, the highest anywhere in Madhya Pradesh that monsoon. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) classified the rain as being in “large excess”. Down to Earth reported that more than 90 percent of fields in Tikamgarh and Niwari went unsown that season, with the little that was planted lost to waterlogging. Twelve months on, the same land is dry again, and the IMD’s own seasonal outlook links this year’s likely deficit to one of the strongest El Niño patterns on record.