Among all the natural disasters, drought has the most catastrophic encroachment on the surrounding and environment. Gulbarga, one of the semi-arid districts of Karnataka state, India receives about 700 mm of average annual rainfall and is drought inclined. In this study, the forecasting of drought for the district has been carried out for a lead time of 1 month and 6 months. The multi-temporal Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) has been used as the drought quantifying parameter due to the fact that it is calculated on the basis of one simplest parameter, i.e., rainfall and additionally due to its ease of use. The fine resolution daily gridded precipitation data (0.25º × 0.25º) procured from Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) of 21 grid locations within the study area have been used for the analysis. Forecasting of drought plays a significant role in drought preparedness and mitigation plans. With the advent of machine learning (ML) techniques over the past few decades, forecasting of any hydrologic event has become easier and more accurate. However, the use of these techniques for drought forecasting is still obscure. In this study, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) techniques have been employed to examine their accuracy in drought forecasting over shorter and longer lead times. Furthermore, two hybrid approaches have been formulated by coupling a data transformation method with each of the aforementioned ML approaches. At the outset, pre-processing of input data (i.e., SPI) has been carried out using Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) and then used as inputs to ANN and SVR models to induce hybrid WP-ANN and WP-SVR models. The performance of the hybrid models has been evaluated based on the statistical indices such as R2 (co-efficient of determination), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), and MAE (Mean Absolute Error). The results showed that the hybrid techniques have better forecast performance than the standalone machine learning approaches. Hybrid WP-ANN model performed relatively better than WP-SVR model for most of the grid locations. Also, the forecasting results deteriorated as the lead time increased from 1 to 6 months. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.