Kamal Ghorui
There was a time when March in India felt like a pause.Not winter, not summer. Not the bite of January fog, not the hard glare of May. It was the season of light shawls, flowering trees, exam mornings, cool evenings and that brief, forgiving softness between two extremes.Now, in many parts of India, that pause seems to be disappearing.The fan returns too early. The sweater leaves too soon. Afternoons begin to sting by late February. By early March, in some cities, the sun already feels like a warning. The calendar may still insist it is the season of flowers. But the skin knows better: this is already the season of heat.And yet, this week, parts of north India briefly felt like they had been handed spring back. Rain, cloud cover and gusty winds brought a sudden drop in temperatures across several cities in the past couple of days, including Delhi, offering a short-lived respite from the early heat. For a day or two, the air softened. The sun retreated. The season almost seemed to remember itself.But that is exactly what makes the moment feel so deceptive. A stray shower or a brief cool spell does not undo the larger pattern. It only interrupts it. Across much of India, the deeper trend remains the same: winters are warming, heat is arriving earlier, and the fragile transition once called spring is becoming shorter, sharper and less reliable.
In the popular imagination of the last decade, the phrase “Winter is Coming” was a chilling omen from Game of Thrones, a warning of a world ending in ice. In modern India, the tragedy is reversed. Winter comes late, stays briefly and is cut short before it can fully retreat.
Why the loss of spring feels personal in India
In India, spring was never just a pleasant interval between winter and summer. It was a season with memory, meaning and cultural weight. In Indian literary imagination, it is often called Rituraj — the king of seasons — the brief, beloved interlude of blossom, breeze and balance.Few modern lines capture the unease of changing seasons as hauntingly as Gulzar’s words in Kadvi Hawa: “Mausam beghar hone lage hain” — the seasons have begun to become homeless. The line was written for a film, but it now feels uncomfortably close to reality.Long before climate science gave us charts and anomalies, Indian tradition gave spring a place of honour. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says, “Ritunam Kusumakarah” — among seasons, I am spring, the flower-bearing season. Kalidasa, too, gave Vasanta a special splendour in Ritusamhara, where spring appears not merely as weather, but as beauty, desire and renewal.That is why the loss feels so intimate. If spring is becoming shorter or harder to recognise, what is under strain is not just a season, but a cherished part of Indian life — the mustard fields, flowering trees, open windows, exam mornings, festival air and the first real relief after winter.
But in a warming India, that king appears to be losing ground.This is not nostalgia dressed up as climate anxiety. India’s own weather data increasingly suggests that winters are running warmer, heat is arriving earlier, and the short bridge once called spring is under growing pressure.In late February this year, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) warned that an above-normal number of heatwave days is likely across most parts of the country during March to May, especially across the northwest, central and eastern belts.That warning came after a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar. 2024 was India’s warmest year on record since 1901, with the annual mean land surface temperature 0.65°C above the 1991–2020 average, according to IMD’s annual climate summary. Then came 2025, which IMD said was the eighth warmest year since 1901, with the all-India annual mean temperature 0.28°C above the long-term average. One hot year can be shrugged off as a bad year. Two hot years in a row begin to look like a pattern. A decade of them starts to feel like a new climate.And somewhere in that shift, spring, India’s most delicate season, appears to be getting squeezed out.
A season built on balance — and why that balance is breaking
India has never had the dramatic four-season calendar of Europe. Spring here was always more delicate, more regional, more atmospheric than official. It arrived differently in Delhi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Bengaluru or the hills. It was not a season of snowmelt and tulips everywhere; it was a season of transition.That is precisely why it is so vulnerable. Spring in India has always depended less on fixed dates than on balance.Spring is, by definition, a transition. It survives on a narrow window between retreating winter and advancing summer. It needs winter to linger just long enough, and summer to wait just long enough. When winters grow warmer and heat arrives earlier, that window begins to shrink. The result is not just a hotter March, but a shorter and more abrupt transition between winter and summer.But as climate scientists have noted, that window appears to be shrinking in India. Climate Central’s 2024 analysis found that in many northern states, slight cooling or weak warming in January is now followed by sharp warming in February, creating the potential for an abrupt jump into the much warmer conditions that traditionally arrived in March. In simple terms, spring may still exist on the calendar, but in many places it is fading from experience.For generations, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous line offered a comforting seasonal promise: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” In a warming India, that promise now feels less certain. Winter may still come. But in many places, spring no longer seems to fully arrive before summer barges in.That is what many Indians have been feeling in recent years and what the data is beginning to echo.Kavita Ashok, who is an environmentalist and president of environment-based NGO called Tree For Life, told TOI that the “intense warming of February gives the indication of a ‘vanishing spring’”, a phrase that captures the increasingly abrupt transition many parts of India appear to be experiencing.
The warning signs were already there in 2025
Before 2026’s heat alerts, 2025 had already shown how fragile the transition season had become.In 2025, IMD said February was the warmest February in India since record-keeping began in 1901. The same IMD outlook also warned that March–May 2025 was likely to see above-normal heatwave days over most parts of the country. Even rainfall patterns were flashing stress. IMD said all-India rainfall in February 2025 was 10.9 mm, the 18th lowest since 1901 and the fifth lowest since 2001. That matters because late-winter and early-spring moisture helps keep land surfaces cooler. A dry February can prime the ground for hotter weeks ahead. In fact, new research has begun to underline exactly this link. A 2024 study examining Indian heatwaves found that low soil moisture weeks before a heatwave is a major precondition for high temperatures in north-central India, and that weaker western-disturbance-linked moisture transport can help set the stage. In simpler terms, when winter leaves dry footprints, summer can sprint in faster.
2026 is making the pattern harder to ignore
This year’s forecast may sound technical, but what it implies is easy to understand.According to the IMD’s March–May outlook, above-normal heatwave days are expected over most parts of India, including West Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, southern and eastern Maharashtra, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Gangetic West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
At the same time, IMD also said that the maximum temperatures in March may still be normal to below normal in many parts initially, partly because March rainfall was expected to be near normal. That may sound contradictory, but it actually tells a deeper story: the climate is not simply “always hotter every day.” It is becoming more volatile. A brief cool spell, a stray shower, or a thunderstorm can temporarily pull temperatures down, even as the seasonal baseline keeps climbing.That is why one rainy day in Delhi in March does not disprove the larger trend. These short respites sit inside a hotter frame. The IMD’s own live warnings in March also flagged heatwave to severe heatwave conditions over Gujarat in mid-March. This is what a disrupted spring increasingly looks like: not a smooth transition, but a tug-of-war between abrupt heat spikes and sudden weather breaks.
The Himalayas, India’s climate wall, are under strain
If India has a weather buffer, it is the Himalayas.They are not just a postcard landscape or a tourism season. They are a climate engine. Snowpack, winter precipitation, and western disturbances together shape how much cold air, moisture and seasonal moderation travel into the plains.In Game of Thrones, the Wall protected the realm from what lay beyond. In India’s climate story, the Himalayas play a similarly stabilising role. And that wall is under stress.In 2025, the Hindu Kush Himalayan region recorded its lowest snow persistence in 23 years, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). Seasonal snow persistence, a measure of how long snow remains on the ground between November and March, was 23.6% below normal, the third consecutive below-normal snow year. For India, the details are especially important. ICIMOD said the Ganga basin saw snow persistence 24.1% below normal, the lowest in 23 years.
And snow is not just a mountain story. ICIMOD notes that, on average, seasonal snowmelt contributes about 23% of the total annual water flow in major river basins across the Hindu Kush Himalaya.Less persistent snow means earlier melt, lower late-season buffering, and more stress on water systems downstream. It also means the seasonal logic that once fed a softer spring in northern India is being disturbed.Ashok also pointed to weak western disturbances this winter, saying lower rainfall and snowfall may have contributed to a sharper, less forgiving transition in the plains.This is why the “spring is disappearing” feeling is not merely urban melodrama. It may be connected to a much larger mountain-to-plain chain of disruption.
When the body notices before the instruments do
Climate change is often explained in charts. But people usually feel it first in the body.You feel it when February afternoons start to look like April. There is silent violence in the air. The crispness that usually defines a North Indian spring, that gentle, cool breeze that lingers into late March, is missing. Instead, the sun has a sharper, more stinging bite. You feel it when school assemblies grow harsher, when weddings move indoors sooner, when park walks shrink and when Holi begins to feel less like the end of winter and more like the beginning of summer survival.What disappears with spring is not just comfort, but a familiar way of moving through daily life.You can sometimes see the disruption in the colours of the city. The semal still erupts in red, bougainvillaea still spills over walls, amaltas still waits for its golden turn, and gulmohar still readies its annual blaze. But the old sequence feels less certain now. The flowers return, yet the air around them is different. What once felt like the soft unfolding of spring increasingly arrives under a harder sun, as if summer has stepped onto the stage before spring could finish its lines.It is the season when northern India once opened windows instead of shutting them. When balconies became usable again. When markets stayed busy after sunset. When woollens were folded away slowly, not abruptly. When flowering trees — amaltas, semal, gulmohar in some places, jacaranda in others — mark time more gently than a weather app.Now, in city after city, that once-familiar in-between season feels more abrupt, more uneven and harder to trust.A recent Time report noted that India’s cities are warming nearly twice as fast as rural areas because climate change and urbanisation are intensifying the urban heat island effect. That means spring is being squeezed from two sides at once: by a warming planet and by hotter, denser, concrete-heavy cities.
How Indian cities are making spring disappear faster
Not every lost season is lost only to carbon.Some of it is being paved over.The modern Indian city has become very good at trapping heat. Dark roads, glass facades, fewer trees, disappearing wetlands, exposed concrete, traffic, generators, AC exhaust, dense construction and shrinking breathable public space. All of these store heat by day and release it slowly at night.Ashok also links the disappearing feel of spring to urban expansion, concrete-heavy cityscapes and shrinking green cover, all of which can trap heat and make Indian cities feel warmer, faster.“Climate change and global warming are creating ripples of heat across the globe. This could be attributed to urban expansion, concrete cities and depleting forests and green cover. When we mess with the earth, we pay a heavy price with scorching heat and drying rivers,” said Ashok.
That is why even when a city gets a pleasant afternoon breeze, the nights may stay uncomfortably warm. And when nights warm up, the body loses recovery time.This is crucial because the IMD’s 2026 outlook warns not only about daytime heat. It says minimum temperatures are very likely to be above normal over most parts of the country during March to May 2026. Hotter nights are one of the clearest signs that a place is not just experiencing weather, it is shifting climate.In a true spring, evenings forgive the day. In a warming city, they increasingly do not.
Farmers feel the loss first — and harder
For urban dwellers, the disappearance of spring may mean discomfort. For farmers, it can mean damage.The winter-to-summer bridge is critical for wheat, mustard, chickpea, rapeseed, horticulture and flowering cycles. A premature heat surge during grain filling or maturation can cut yields. That is why IMD itself flagged concern in 2025 that warmer late winter and above-normal heat could affect winter crops such as wheat and rapeseed during their maturing phase. In 2026, that concern has returned.Reports from Punjab earlier this month said maximum temperatures were running about 7.5°C above normal in early March, raising fresh worries for standing wheat. What looks like a vanished spring in the city can yield stress in the field.
Not the end of spring — but the end of trusting it
It would be too simple and not fully accurate to declare that spring is “gone” from all of India.India is too large, too varied, too topographically complex for that. Some parts of the south plateau still retain a more gradual transition in some years. Some hill regions still offer a recognisable spring. Some years still deliver a generous March. Some cities will have cooler interruptions, rain breaks, or delayed heat surges.The real story is not extinction. It is fragmentation.Spring is becoming shorter in many places, less reliable, more regionally uneven, more easily interrupted by extreme heat and less socially legible.That last point matters. Seasons are not just meteorological categories. They are cultural expectations. When people stop trusting the season to behave like itself, the season begins to lose meaning.In that sense, spring may survive in the data longer than it survives in memory.
What the fading of Rituraj is really warning us about
The concern about spring can sound soft. But it is actually a concern about systems.It is about warmer winters, drier soils, stressed snowpack, volatile transition months, urban heat islands, crop risk, rising night temperatures, and a country learning that climate change does not always arrive as a spectacular disaster.Sometimes it arrives as the disappearance of something subtle.Not a flood. Not a cyclone. Not a headline-grabbing heatwave, at least not at first.Sometimes it arrives as the quiet shortening of a season that once taught the body how to move from cold to heat.That is what makes the shift feel larger than a simple change in temperature.Rituraj was the country’s brief season of balance — a pause between two extremes that people quietly built their routines around.And when that season becomes shorter, harsher and less reliable, the loss is not only meteorological. It touches memory, habit and the texture of everyday life.Spring has not vanished from the calendar. But in a warming India, it is fading from lived experience, overtaken, too often and too early, by the heat of a season that now refuses to wait.And that is not just weather.That is a warning.
