From Konkan’s Alphonso to Andhra’s Imam Pasand, why are Indian mangoes losing their sweet spot?

But the Bathua mango is on the brink of extinction, and the pride of being an orchard owner is fading away, replaced by a sense of loss and foreboding. Orchard owner Pramod Sharma, 54, who now runs a petty construction business, speaks of the mango like a lost childhood friend. Nowadays, he laments, most owners sell their orchards before the onset of flowering. In these parts, mango trees flower in January and the harvest begins in June, before the arrival of the monsoon rains.

This year, Sharma pre-sold the harvest of his 100-tree orchard for a pittance: ₹61,000. That translates to a farm gate price of less than ₹10 for the prized Malda variety, just about what a farmer growing potatoes or tomato hopes to make. It was Sharma’s best bet. Pre-selling the harvest to a thekedar or contractor freed him from spending on nutrients and pesticides, and the risk of a crop loss or price crash in future.

But there’s a cost. Contractors often apply growth regulators such as paclobutrazol, PBZ in short, to induce flowering. Most mango varieties fruit well one year and produce little or nothing the next. Contractors apply PBZ, often many times more than the recommended dose, to restrict vegetative growth and force reproductive growth or flowering intensity.

Farmers say this goes against nature, and liken it to forcing a woman to bear children without allowing her the nine-month gestation period.

Contractors also overuse pesticides, including those not recommended for use in fruit trees (such as chlorpyrifos), and apply fertilizers (again, not recommended), including urea, to drive yields.

Sharma and other orchard owners are aware the trees will eventually weaken from the continuous assault and that yields will plunge after some years. Some trees will be razed, he says, and the orchard will have to be replanted.

Yet, Sharma has been pre-selling his mangoes for a decade. “I have no choice," he explains. There are too many factors beyond his control—the climate has turned wayward, pests and diseases have increased, hired labour is expensive, and prices are volatile. “I may sell the orchard for two years in a row, but my grandson will sell it for ten. Over the phone, from a faraway city," he says. Many absentee owners already do so.

More than two-third of all mangoes in India are now grown in this manner, scientists and experts told Mint, reducing the king of fruits to a crop raised and sold by a contractor-trader nexus. The result? Poor quality fruits with high levels of chemical residue. The crop is often harvested two-three weeks before the mangoes mature on trees to extract the price premium commanded by the season’s first arrival. These are then artificially ripened with chemicals such as calcium carbide, which result in tasteless, unevenly ripe, and highly toxic fruits.

India’s mango sector is built on the fly-by-night operations of desperate contractors, Sopan Joshi writes in his seminal book, Mangifera indica —A Biography of the Mango, published last year.

But the travails of the king of fruits are not limited to orchards and the machinations of contractors. India’s centuries-old varieties are struggling to cope with growing climate risks, from temperature variations that hasten ripening to freak storms damaging a season’s harvest. Meanwhile, research to develop resilient varieties with a longer shelf life has had limited success due to paltry funding and the sheer number of years it takes to get there.

As a result, the mango lover is left high and dry with choices limited to local cultivars. Only a few varieties are exported because mangoes have a short shelf life after harvest—no more than two weeks. Within India, however, there is a ready market, considering that people are willing to spend a fortune on pears from Chile. And yet, a mango from north India is unable to reach a consumer in the south.

As Joshi puts it in his book, “The fruit over which the shauqueen (Hindi for aficionado) holds forth is actually grown and traded in an environment of indifference."

Warring neighbours

In 1969, neighbours El Salvador and Honduras fought a 100-hour war, popularly known as the ‘football war’, after tensions between the citizenry of the two countries escalated during qualifiers for the 1970 world cup and a playoff.

There is no danger of a war breaking out between Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, but the fate of the mango has led to tensions simmering between farmers in the neighbouring states. The instigator: climate change.

An extended monsoon last year led to delayed flowering, pushing the harvest season to coincide with the onset of this year’s monsoon, which arrived earlier than usual. Farmers rushed to pluck the fruits to protect them from the rains, leading to a sudden spurt in market arrivals and a collapse in prices.

The result was a mango war. Andhra Pradesh offered its farmers a price subsidy, a modest ₹4 per kg, which left farmers in Tamil Nadu fuming. They blocked highways, unable to sell to pulp makers, who were already sitting on stocks from last year, and preferred to make any purchases on the cheap, from the Andhra growers.

Climate change played havoc in the north, as well. A heat wave and temperature swings late in May and early-June hastened ripening of the famous Dasheri mango from Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh, the largest producing state. Farmers rushed to harvest the fruits, and plucked unripe ones as well to save on labour costs, leading to a crash in prices, says Insram Ali, president of the All-India Mango Grower’s Association, who owns an orchard in Malihabad.

Temperature fluctuations in orchards are affecting flowering of mango trees and impacting yields, says M. Sankaran, principal scientist and head of the fruit crops division at Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru.

In addition, the flowering period is shifting by 30-45 days, leading to the harvest season coinciding with monsoon rains, a nightmare for farmers and traders, as events in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu proved. It’s like throwing a wet blanket over a highly perishable fruit, harvested in hot and humid conditions.

The bigger question is: what will happen a few decades from now as climate risks multiply? Will the 500-year-old Alphonso from coastal Maharashtra still exist?

A poor traveller

If you were to Google ‘the sweetest mango in the world’, the search engine will cite the Guinness Book of World Records and tell you it’s the Carabao mango from the Philippines, a variety named after a water buffalo, of all things.

Bovine considerations aside, Indians would disagree with that assessment by the British reference book, citing their own varieties, from the Alphonso and Imam Pasand to the Dasheri and Kesar, which excel in sweetness and complexity of flavour. Unfortunately, the rest of the world wouldn’t know any better because very few mangoes from India leave its shores—despite the country being the largest producer in the world, exports are miniscule.

In 2024-25, mango production was estimated at 23 million tonnes, making it the second largest fruit crop after the banana. But India exported less than 30,000 tonnes of fresh mangoes. After adding 63,000 tonnes of pulp, the total export volume was less than 0.5% of production, and valued at just ₹1,150 crore (less than a third of what India earns from exports of grapes, a minor fruit crop).

The ancient varieties grown in India have a short shelf life of 5-12 days, which means the fruits have to be shipped using prohibitively expensive air routes, and not the cheaper but longer sea routes.

Still, the two-week window is sufficient for mangoes from every region to make their way to every market in the country. And yet, there is no pan-India market for the fruit, except for a few cultivars such as the Banaganapalle from the south and Alphonso and Kesar from the west.

And so, a mango lover from the north still cannot lay her hands on the Jardalu from Bihar, Malgova from Tamil Nadu or Himsagar from West Bengal. Similarly, the Langra or Dasheri from Uttar Pradesh is a hard find in Chennai or Bengaluru. Most commercial and popular mango varieties are limited to their respective geographies.

It’s not as if there is no market. Consumers are certainly willing to pay what it takes—this is clear from how they shell out a hefty premium to sink their teeth into imported apples and pears and kiwis and berries. In 2024-25, India imported fresh fruits worth ₹25,770 crore.

When some varieties do make their way to other markets, the experience can be disappointing instead of laying the foundation for a nationwide market. For instance, a resident of Delhi NCR can order Andhra Pradesh’s famed Imam Pasand, also known as Himayat, on a quick commerce portal. It would take a small fortune— ₹159 for one mango weighing 400 gm. But, chances are, the fruit, while soft outside, will be raw inside—suggesting that it was forcibly ripened. Such unethical practices lead customers to shun the unfamiliar and stick to local varieties. As long as mangoes cannot travel within the country, there is little hope for them becoming an export item.

Hope in the lab

Much sweetness ensues when north and south join together as one, as those who have consumed the delicious Mallika mango will testify. The hybrid variety was released in the early 1970s, by cross-pollinating Neelam mangoes from south India with Dasheris native to the north.

Most popular mango varieties in India are 200-500 years old and are struggling to cope with growing climate risks. Unfortunately, aside from the Mallika and Amrapali, another hybrid, other lab varieties have not enjoyed much success. India grows over 1,000 varieties of mangoes, but it is yet to develop a research variety with a long shelf life. Or that can match the commercial popularity of age-old ones.

Beyond climate risks, India is in dire need of new and improved varieties because a longer shelf life can open the doors to the lucrative export market. “Except for a few progressive farmers who also export, mango cultivation is ridden by unscientific practices, which results in inconsistent quality. No one is checking the residue levels of produce coming to wholesale markets within India," says K.S. Ravi, managing director of Innova Bio Park, Bengaluru, an integrated facility for export of farm produce, including mangoes.

For exports to become viable, India needs to invest more on research to deliver varieties with a longer shelf life, and introduce improved post-harvest technology and practices, Ravi adds.

However, despite the existential challenges the mango faces, funding for breeding, research and technology development is miniscule. The annual budget of the fruit crops division at the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research, Bengaluru, one of the three leading institutes in India working on the fruit, is a mere ₹1 crore. That amount has to be spent on research on a bunch of fruits, in addition to maintaining a field gene bank hosting 767 mango varieties and cultivars of 15 other fruits.

In 2024-25, per the union budget, spending on horticulture sciences was a paltry ₹257 crore, meant for all fruits and vegetables. That’s less than what India spends to build 10 km of a high-speed, multi-lane highway.

There is, however, a flicker of hope. The Lucknow-based Central Institute of Subtropical Horticulture (CISH), which started its journey as the Central Mango Research Station in 1972, has come up with a bio-stimulant named ‘metwash’ which can extend the shelf life of mangoes by up to 40 days when stored at 13 degrees Celsius. “We are in the process of commercializing the product. Also, our institute has developed two climate-resilient varieties (Awadh Abhaya and Awadh Samriddhi) which will be ready for commercial release in the next five-six years," says T. Damodaran, director of the institute, which has an annual budget of ₹4 crore to work on a variety of fruit crops.

While their funding is meagre, research institutes have been gamely trying to keep the crop going for future generations. “The work on varietal improvement on mangoes has been going on since the 1960s and more than 50 hybrids have been released till date," notes Sankaran of the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research.

Whether these varieties are adopted by farmers depends on the speed and efficiency of the farm extension machinery, whose job is to take the research from the lab to the farms. But the bigger challenge with mangoes is that it takes more than two decades to come up with a new variety, Sankaran adds. And then, it takes another couple of decades for new varieties to gain a foothold in the market.

Whether Samastipur will still have mango orchards if and when that happens is anyone’s guess.