Have you tried using minPartitions

Minimum number of partitions to read from Kafka. You can configure Spark to use an arbitrary minimum of partitions to read from Kafka using the minPartitions option. Normally Spark has a 1-1 mapping of Kafka topicPartitions to Spark partitions consuming from Kafka. If you set the minPartitions option to a value greater than your Kafka topicPartitions, Spark will divvy up large Kafka partitions to smaller pieces. This option can be set at times of peak loads, data skew, and as your stream is falling behind to increase processing rate. It comes at a cost of initializing Kafka consumers at each trigger, which may impact performance if you use SSL when connecting to Kafka.