On May 24, 2025, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) recorded the earliest monsoon onset in 16 years, as it landed in Kerala 8 days ahead of the usual June 1 date.
Within days, the system rapidly progressed across the west coast, penetrating Maharashtra, central India, and the Northeast by May 29. Though a brief pause occurred in early June, the monsoon resumed, reaching northwest India—including Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab—between June 22–25, several days ahead of the average June 30–July 1 timeline.
Rainfall in northwest India, which feeds the eastern tributaries of the Indus Basin (Sutlej, Beas, Ravi), stood at 108% of the long-period average in June. This early arrival is not an isolated anomaly, but part of a larger shift: dry winters, intense heatwaves, and extended monsoons are becoming the new climate normal.
This trio of climate extremes is reshaping the Indus Basin. For the past several years, northwest India and the western Himalayas have witnessed weakening Western Disturbances and drastically reduced winter precipitation. Himachal Pradesh recorded its driest January since 1901 in 2024, with a rainfall deficit of 99.7%, while the wider region saw a December shortfall exceeding 80%. These trends mean diminished snowpack, earlier snowmelt, and weakened springtime river flows. To compensate, the monsoon is becoming more erratic and elongated. IMD data shows delayed withdrawal of 1–2 weeks, pushing significant rainfall into October. In 2024, Delhi received eight times its average October rainfall—the wettest since 1956. Climate studies also show that extreme rainfall events in northwest India are increasing in both frequency and intensity. Rivers no longer adhere to historical flow regimes. This presents a serious challenge to the Indus Basin’s water infrastructure—built by colonial engineers to function within a fixed seasonal rhythm. Canals, barrages, and embankments were designed to control and redirect rivers for irrigation and revenue, with no room for variability. Their logic was political and extractive: to delink rivers from their floodplains, and ultimately the Indus from its delta and the Arabian Sea.
But climate change is undermining that design. Earlier and heavier rains fill reservoirs too quickly, while longer monsoons overtop embankments and restore contact between rivers and floodplains.
These floodplains—once dismissed as wastelands—are now critical buffers, recharging groundwater, absorbing excess water, and mitigating disasters.
The delta, too, is seeing brief but significant freshwater pulses. In 2022 and 2023, extendedmonsoon flows reached portions of the Indus delta that had been dry for decades. Though not policy-driven, these events reveal the potential of natural hydrology to reverse ecological decline. Yet institutions lag. The Indus Waters Treaty and canal systems remain locked in outdated assumptions. There is little room for adaptive management, and no framework to respond to seasonal fluidity. Postcolonial regimes have failed to reform the system; climate change is doing it instead.
Nature doesn’t ask for permission. It floods. It fills. It restores. In defiance of engineered constraints, the rivers are reclaiming their course—and rewriting the rules of the Indus Basin.
—The writer is a political analyst, based in Islamabad.
