India, Oct. 26 -- By eight in the morning, the air in Elappully already quivers with heat. The ground glows dull and firm; the ponds have shrunk into cracked clay bowls, and the wells are empty with fluorescent stains. There is no mist here anymore, only dust, rising like smoke from the surrounding paddy fields. "We start work before sunrise," says Sethumadhavan P, a sixty-four-year-old farmer. "By ten, the earth burns your feet."

Elappully, a small panchayat on the outskirts of Palakkad town, has always known the sun, but the summers are no longer familiar. Every year, the groundwater drops deeper; the pumps wheeze and spit air. "Once our paddy was green until April," Sethumadhavan says. "Now we see cracks even when the monsoons are rai...