Drought relief in India is too often reduced to price support. Suggest an integrated drought-resilience framework that brings together procurement, employment guarantees and micro-irrigation.

In October 2026, drought had hit 315 of Telangana's 621 mandals, and the state's main demand was 100% MSP procurement [1]. Price support pays only for the harvest that survives. Real resilience must protect income, livelihoods and water together.

Why price support alone falls short

• No crop, no MSP: farmers whose paddy has withered, as in Sangareddy, have little left to sell [1].
• The cap is not what limits buying: only about 3% of pulse output was procured under PSS in 2024-25, against a 25% cap [4]. The real limit is weak procurement capacity.
• Thin budget: PM-AASHA spent ₹5,438 crore in 2024-25 [3]. That is far too little for open-ended buying.
• Landless workers get nothing from higher crop prices.

An integrated framework: three pillars

1. Procurement: targeted, not maximal

• In declared drought mandals, calculate the 25% PSS cap [2] on a normal year's output, so the cap does not shrink when harvests do.
• Extend PDPS-style gap payments (up to 15% of MSP, paid by DBT) [2] to maize and jowar. This avoids storage costs.
• Act on the Standing Committee's call to expand pulse and oilseed procurement towards 100% [5], and back it with more procurement centres.

2. Employment guarantee: an income floor

• Add extra wage-days automatically once drought is declared, under the rural employment mission [1].
• Give priority to works that build water assets: farm ponds, check dams and desilting.

3. Micro-irrigation: long-term adaptation

• Bring forward PMKSY "Per Drop More Crop" subsidies in drought-prone blocks, and fund inter-cropping seed [1].
• Shift land from water-hungry paddy to millets (Shree Anna) and pulses.

Convergence mechanism

Drought declared (Manual for Drought Management)
        ↓
Extra wage-days + PMFBY/SDRF payouts → immediate income
        ↓
Water works under employment scheme → micro-irrigation
        ↓
Diversified crops → assured procurement / PDPS

Fig: From relief to resilience

• One district drought plan that pools Centre and state funds, tracked on a shared dashboard.

Procurement, wages and water work best as one chain, not as separate silos. If India moves from crisis-time price support to planned, climate-adaptive resilience, it can protect farmers before distress sets in. This advances SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 13 (Climate Action) and follows the direction the Parliamentary Standing Committee recommended.