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.For thousands of farming families across the State, the primary worry is no longer about which crop will fetch a good price in the market. Instead, the questions are whether they can plant anything at all? What crops can survive with dwindling water supply? Or whether their harvests will ever cover their mounting debts?“If there are no rains, we cannot even plough the land properly. We ploughed once when there was some moisture, but the soil has dried up again [this Kharif season]. Everything has come to a standstill,” Srinivasa Rao says.There is also a psychological dimension to the crisis, says Srinivasa Rao. Farming, he says, is a seasonal occupation built around hope. A farmer prepares the land in anticipation of rain and watches the sky while deciding whether to sow. When the monsoon behaves unpredictably, every decision becomes a gamble.“We [farmers] keep waiting for the next rain before deciding what to do. We have to think about whether to sow, whether to spend more money and whether the crop will survive,” he says.Dilemma of crop diversificationCaught between erratic weather and spiralling financial risks, farmers in the State face a harsh reality. Although the State government’s advice to switch from water-hungry paddy to drought-hardy crops sounds good on paper, it ignores the heavy debts and rigid system tied to traditional farming. For farmers accustomed to paddy cultivation, the decision is not so simple. Paddy is not merely another crop. It is a familiar agricultural system with established seed supply, cultivation practices, labour arrangements, procurement channels and marketing mechanisms. When farmers are asked to shift to red gram, black gram, green gram, castor, millets or other crops, they are effectively being asked to reorganise their entire agricultural plan.In the dryland belt around Kottur mandal in the Bapatla district, where nearly 3,800 acres depend largely on rainfall, agriculture has virtually come to a halt. Tobacco, once an important commercial crop, has lost much of its attraction because of weak demand and market uncertainty. Chilli cultivation has shrunk to barely 100 to 150 acres, constrained by water scarcity and soaring input costs.Farmers are now pinning their hopes on Bengal gram, which can still be sown in November or December, if the rains return. But even this represents a gamble. A delayed shift to an alternative crop can mean fresh expenditure on seed and land preparation, without any certainty over weather or prices.