Want to save Alphonso mango from heatwave? Start with open data

The Maharashtra government must fund activities that can develop, certify, and rapidly multiply climate-resilient mango cultivars, along with other agricultural products.

28 April, 2026
The Pint

We may look forward to the mango season with delight and anticipation. Yet, the mood is sombre among Alphonso farmers. A recent report suggests that Alphonso production in Sindhudurg is down 85-90 per cent this season. Production is down in Ratnagiri by roughly 70 per cent, and in Raigad, by 60 per cent.

The farmers are haggling with the Maharashtra government over compensation amounts, and may reach a compromise at some point. But the Alphonso crisis represents the proverbial canary in the climate-change coal mine, with estimates suggesting that climate change could shave 3-10 per cent off GDP by the end of the century. This requires a serious policy response on climate adaptation.

The climate contract

Each cultivar—a plant variety bred to hold on to specific traits each time it is grown—has a climate contract. It demands certain conditions to flourish. The Alphonso mango needs 300 hours of direct sunlight in October to trigger flowering, colder conditions for flowering and fruiting, and subtropical or tropical climates, with optimal temperatures between 24 and 30 degrees Celsius, for the fruits to mature. Every farming year has fluctuations: a hot February, a late monsoon, or a stray hailstorm. The relevant question is whether the current changes are just fluctuations around a stable mean, or whether the underlying process itself has shifted. The evidence is increasingly suggesting the latter.

First, Konkan summer temperatures have shifted upward to 33 degrees Celsius in February and March. The monsoon has become more erratic and delayed, and arrives in sudden bursts instead of the steady drizzle. An increase in sea temperatures has led to cyclones, which are now rapidly intensifying in a historically calm region. Storms such as Tauktae and Biparjoy used to be once-in-a-generation events. They are now becoming the new normal, arriving at exactly the moment when the Alphonso is most vulnerable. The plant cultivar is now facing a climate it has not evolved for.

While our focus today may be the Alphonso, the climate contract is being rewritten across the Indian landscape: wheat in Punjab, coffee in Coorg, apples in Himachal, and paddy in the deltas. Each of these confronts a serious threat to its viability under status-quo farming techniques, even as the changing climate opens possibilities yet to be explored.

Public policy in climate adaptation

What has the climate contract got to do with economics and public policy, you might ask. Once you accept that the underlying process has changed, the policy response has to fundamentally change, too. Traditionally, India has resorted to a policy of compensation, either directly through fiscal transfers or through crop-insurance type products that make payments after a pre-specified event. But both of these break down if the change is structural instead of a mere fluctuation. If we keep following the same practices under different climatic conditions, we will keep debating compensation amounts every year. In the new normal, compensation does not make for a sustainable strategy. We need a shift in the way we have been organising our production, infrastructure, and consumption. This is the central objective of climate adaptation.

One could argue that farmers (or other private sector companies) are incentivised to figure this out themselves and plant cultivars that are more resistant to climate change. Markets have solved parts of this problem before. The private sector can develop new plant varieties or hybrid seeds and earn money from them. Farmers’ cooperatives can fund things together. Policy merely needs to ensure that the incentives for individuals and firms to innovate remain clear.

But there are some parts of the job the market is unlikely to take on. For example, evaluating which cultivar to switch to requires knowledge of what the climate will look like in a specific village. This, in turn, requires field trials to run consistently across agroclimatic zones for several years and databases that record the flowering of plants against weather logs, among other things. The state has a role to play in funding activities that can develop, certify, and rapidly multiply climate-resilient mango cultivars, along with other agricultural products.

Finally, climate-resistant farming depends on open data. Figuring out which mango trees survive a heatwave needs a lot of information. Every reading from a weather station, result from a farm experiment, and soil test from a village needs to be recorded. Currently, a lot of this data either doesn’t exist, sits locked away in some government office, or is recorded in formats that don’t talk to each other. The data must be collected properly, stored in a standard format, and made free for anyone to use, from scientists trying to breed a tougher crop to officers advising farmers to agriculture startups building apps. Any serious plan to adapt to climate change has to start by treating farm and weather data the same way we treat roads, electricity, or the internet: as essential infrastructure the nation depends on.

The plight of farmers in Konkan is not national news. But it is a warning for Indian agriculture under a changing climate. Adapting to climate change requires measures such as seed libraries, soil databases, and 20-year farm experiments. The longer we mistake compensation for adaptation, the more harvests will fail, because the climate they were built for is fast changing.

RBI is going out of its way to compensate fraud victims. It doesn’t have the mandate

The RBI may consider evaluating the structural reasons why banks do not invest in fraud protection.

14 April, 2026
The Print (with Pratik Datta)

Most of us in India have now become accustomed to authorised push payment (APP) frauds—such as phishing emails, or threats of digital arrests—where customers are tricked into making the transfer themselves. Reports suggest that there were around 28 lakh cyber frauds in 2025, amounting to Rs 22,931 crore.

On 6 March 2026, the Reserve Bank of India released a proposal under which victims of such frauds, involving gross loss up to Rs 50,000, could receive partial compensation—85 per cent of the net loss or Rs 25,000, whichever is lower. The mechanism, however, is available only once in a customer’s lifetime. Most strikingly, the RBI itself would bear 65 per cent of the compensation cost, with the remainder split between the sending and receiving banks.

While one can understand the policy instinct of bringing such transactions into a compensation net, there are serious concerns about its design.

Difficulties in the proposal

First, there’s a practical problem of verifying whether the transaction was indeed fraudulent. The burden of proof for customer eligibility lies with the bank, but this requires that banks have the data, the systems, and the incentive to check. When 65 per cent of the cost is borne by the RBI—at least once in the customer’s lifetime—the bank will have limited incentive to conduct rigorous due diligence.

More troubling is the moral hazard. The draft covers cases where customers shared credentials, downloaded malicious software, or were “tricked into willingly sending money”. Consider a scenario where two parties collude: one transfers money to the other, then claims it was fraud. The transferred funds are returned; the RBI still compensates the claimant. The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCCRP) has already received approximately 28 lakh complaints in 2025. Adding a financial incentive to such complaints will only add to the number.

Additionally, how will the RBI know that it’s a “once in a lifetime” claim for an individual? A customer who has already claimed compensation under this scheme could, without a robust tracking mechanism, attempt to claim again through a different bank account or after a KYC update. Alternatively, either the bank, the RBI, or the NCCRP will have to set up additional systems to verify the once-in-a-lifetime status. There is no guarantee that a bona fide customer, once defrauded, will not face the situation ever again. What then happens to the compensation of such a victim?

The deeper question that the RBI must confront is whether this is really the mandate of a central bank? The RBI’s mandate is inflation targeting and financial stability, not consumer insurance. When the RBI steps in as a direct compensation source, it conflates two entirely separate functions: systemic oversight and retail-loss socialisation. These should be kept apart.

The RBI’s own sunset clause acknowledges the awkwardness: it states that compensation will be reviewed after one year to ‘reduce or eliminate’ the RBI’s share. If the design intention is ultimately to remove the RBI from this equation, why put it there in the first place?

International experience

A comparison with international frameworks is instructive. It is in contrast to the RBI’s proposal.

The United Kingdom addressed APP fraud through the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, which empowered the Payment Systems Regulator to require payment service providers to reimburse customers. The UK model mandates full reimbursement — up to £85,000 per claim — with the cost split 50:50 between the sending and receiving payment service provider.

There is no role for the Bank of England in absorbing any portion of the cost. Payment Service Providers (PSPs) can refuse reimbursement only on two grounds: proven customer fraud or gross negligence, and the burden of proof rests with the PSP. There is no lifetime claim limit; a genuine victim can claim again. In this set-up, those who control the payment infrastructure bear the cost of its failures.

The policy thus incentivises the payments industry to invest further in end-to-end fraud prevention. Brazil, which operates PIX, an instant payment system created by the central bank, requires financial institutions to implement mandatory fraud-screening mechanisms and impose strict timelines for complaint resolution and fund recovery. Critically, the cost of fraud falls on the institutions, not the regulator.

This proposal should not be implemented

The problem of digital fraud is significant and deserves our attention.

But the current proposal is open to abuse, and places the burden of liability exactly in the wrong direction: the RBI bears most of the cost, while banks—who are best placed to prevent fraud at the network level—bear the least.

The central bank neither has the mandate nor the institutional capacity to run a consumer compensation mechanism. The RBI may also want to consider evaluating the structural reasons why banks do not invest in fraud protection.

In today’s policy environment—with zero Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) and National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) centralised control over UPI product design—banks have little incentive for building better fraud detection. Because they don’t earn from UPI transactions, they can’t differentiate the product. The result is a classic underinvestment problem that compensation by the RBI cannot fix.