Is India plumbing the depths of groundwater?

India is the world’s largest groundwater guzzler. It extracted round 245 billion cubic metres (BCM) for irrigating cropland alone in 2011 – about 25% of the world’s groundwater consumption. More lately, as of 2023, the annual groundwater recharge was round 449 BCM whereas the extraction fee was 241 BCM, that means India is drawing roughly 60% of no matter groundwater is accessible yearly.

According to a 2023 report ready by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), the quantity of over-exploited evaluation items — the place the fee of extraction exceeded the fee of recharge — stood at 11.2% of 6,553 items in 2023.

Of course, nationwide tendencies obfuscate extra worrisome regional ones. India’s groundwater disaster turns into most obvious after we take a better have a look at its use for agriculture and to quench the thirst of the nation’s burgeoning city populace. The 2023 report discovered that 91% of the groundwater is extractable; the relaxation is pure discharge. And of the annual extraction, irrigation and home consumption divert 87% and 11% respectively. Only 2% is for industrial use.

The water tour

The bulk of India’s groundwater-stressed areas lie in North and Central India, plus some elements of inside Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Punjab and Haryana: Satellite-based research have discovered that between 2003 and 2020, Punjab and Haryana misplaced 64.6 BCM of groundwater. Between 2002 and 2021, groundwater ranges dropped by 70% throughout all monitored wells in Punjab, with the water desk plummeting by greater than 4 metres.

The tubewell is a typical sight in the paddy fields of Punjab. It makes use of a motor to pump water up by way of a bore and into a short lived reservoir on the floor. From there, the water flows to the fields. Three-fourths (72%) of Punjab’s irrigated space at the moment financial institution on tubewells. The State additionally supplies subsidised or free electrical energy to energy these tubewells, amongst different home equipment, with a purpose to make farming on this area extra worthwhile. But over the years, the pendulum of the area’s water dependence has swung the different means. Rather than preserve farming viable for farmers, as envisaged at the begin of the Green Revolution, Punjab and Haryana have rendered water-intensive agriculture the norm.

Punjab alone has 15 lakh tubewells at the moment, up from 1.9 lakh in 1970, extracting 4.4 BCM per week at their peak. Nearly 80% of Punjab’s blocks are thus labeled as ‘over-exploited’: in 2023, it drew 164 items of water for each 100 items recharged. In many districts in central Punjab, the common drop in the water desk is 0.5 m per yr. Many farmers have responded by merely digging deeper. In Sangrur, farmers have reportedly drilled 55 m over 20 years. Likewise, Haryana attracts round 136 items of water for each 100 items recharged. Just between 2017 and 2023, the quantity of ‘over-exploited’ blocks in the State grew by 11 proportion factors.

Removing groundwater additionally leaves water extra loaded with mineral salts and heavy metals. Both unbiased and government-conducted exams in the two States have reported the presence of extra uranium, arsenic, and chloride and fluoride ions in lots of areas. In Haryana’s southern districts, the groundwater has already been declared unfit for ingesting.

Uttar Pradesh: The higher Ganga-Yamuna doab and the surrounding areas of western Uttar Pradesh additionally follow water-intensive agriculture and expertise groundwater stress. Uttar Pradesh as an entire is extracting 71 items of water for each 100 items recharged however there’s a sharp distinction between its japanese and western areas. Almost all ‘over-exploited’ blocks in the State are in its west, per a 2020 report of the CGWB. In some districts in the area, the water desk has dropped by greater than 20 m in the previous couple of many years.

There are two units of causes. One is as in Punjab/Haryana: giant areas beneath paddy and wheat, extra land being dedicated to cultivating sugarcane (which is much more water-intensive), unchecked use of tubewells, and subsidised electrical energy for pumps. The different is region-specific: Uttar Pradesh’s groundwater can be harassed to a major diploma by urbanisation (see subsequent part). Together, in 2017, about 11% of the State’s blocks had been ‘over-exploited’.

Policies to preserve water and the sometimes sturdy monsoon have reversed tendencies for brief intervals however the long-term prognosis is obvious: western Uttar Pradesh is on skinny ice. Eastern Uttar Pradesh receives extra rain and its rivers have extra quantity, so its aquifers usually recharge quicker than they’re depleted.

Rajasthan: Rajasthan presents a extra troubling image. It is drawing 149 items of water for each 100 items replenished and it’s already India’s driest State. This mixture renders its loss of water extra important. A 2022 authorities report concluded that 203 out of 249 blocks in the State had been both ‘critical’ or ‘over-exploited’.

What little rice Rajasthan cultivates is fed by canal water and the bulk of the water it attracts from the floor is diverted to maintain rural households and livelihoods. Cotton, wheat, and mustard crops in northwest and central Rajasthan are watered by tubewells. Bhilwara and Tonk in southeast Rajasthan get pleasure from comparatively extra rain but in addition spend extra of that water to maintain up double-cropping.

Fluoride and salt contamination are frequent in Rajasthan’s deep aquifers. In some elements, the prevalence of fluorosis — when a physique ingests an excessive amount of fluoride-heavy water, leading to vital harm to bones and joints — is sort of double the nationwide common.

There have been some optimistic developments as properly. The State has pioneered rainwater harvesting and synthetic recharge; State-led programmes reminiscent of the ‘Mukhyamantri Jal Swavlamban Abhiyan’ have inspired the constructing of 1000’s of village ponds. Rajasthan is thus one of a couple of States the place water ranges in additional than half of all monitored wells (51.7%) have been bettering over time.

Maharashtra: According to the CGWB, Maharashtra extracts 54 items of groundwater for each 100 items recharged; in 2023, solely 2.5% of its 350+ talukas had been labeled as ‘over-exploited’. But the State’s central and western areas paint a distinct image. The southwest monsoon has repeatedly ‘failed’ over Marathwada specifically and each time it has, the area has suffered a full-blown water disaster. Groundwater is immediately affected consequently, extra so since the area additionally hosts money crops like cotton and sugarcane.

According to experiences, farmers in elements of Marathwada have sunk borewells all the way down to 90 m or extra in the final three many years. In some areas of Beed, the water desk is now greater than 1 / 4 of a kilometre deep. In 2016, Marathwada was so water-stressed the authorities needed to transport water by prepare to Latur district.

On the different hand, water-intensive agriculture afflicts many elements of west Maharashtra. Ahmednagar, Pune, Sangli, Solapur, and Satara type a near-contiguous irrigated belt to feed quite a few sugarcane farms and sugar mills. While this “sugar belt” has some dams and canals, most of the water comes by way of borewells, particularly in summer time. In and round Nasik and Pune, grape and pomegranate cultivation has expanded as properly, driving a rise in the quantity of tubewells.

According to the CGWB, round 16% of talukas in the State are ‘semi-critical’ and 5% are ‘critical’ or ‘over-exploited’.

Tamil Nadu: Tamil Nadu’s water wants are met predominantly by groundwater and the northeast monsoon. And it’s telling that even in its delta districts, together with Nagapattinam, water ranges in virtually all monitored wells have usually been noticed to fall between pre-monsoon and post-monsoon checkpoints, that means even rainfall has not been in a position to staunch extraction.

One examine estimated that between 2002 and 2012, the State’s extraction exceeded recharge by 8%. By 2017, ranges in round 89% of monitored wells in the State had been dropping, led by districts in its north and west. For instance, in 2013-2017, the quantity of ‘over-exploited’ blocks in Tiruvallur elevated by 75%.

In July 2024, Minister of State for Jal Shakti Rajbhushan Choudhary mentioned in the Rajya Sabha: “In order to assess the long-term fluctuation in groundwater level in Tamil Nadu, the water-level data collected by CGWB in Tamil Nadu during November 2023 has been compared with the decadal mean water levels for the month of November from 2013 to 2022. … Analysis of water level data indicated that about 72.6% of the wells monitored registered a rise in groundwater levels.”

But an extended long-term development factors the different means. In 2024, of 14.45 BCM of groundwater extracted yearly in the State, 13.51 BCM was used for irrigation. Some city pockets together with Chennai are additionally overdrawing groundwater however as industrial wants are of late being met extra by floor water and desalination, agriculture stays the principal concern.

Dry-season cropping is sort of solely watered by groundwater as a result of, in contrast to in North India, the State receives the bulk of its rain in the winter. By the mid-2020s, 106 talukas out of 313 assessed had been ‘over-exploited’. There has been a gradual shift in cropping patterns: farmers in drier areas have been favouring much less water-intensive crops reminiscent of millets, pulses, and maize whereas some others switched from sugarcane to cotton or horticulture watered by drip irrigation. But the bulk of agriculture in the State is concentrated on water-intensive money crops.

Thirsty cities

By 2015, groundwater was the sole supply of water for greater than 630 city native our bodies in Uttar Pradesh. Apart from Meerut and Agra, Allahabad, Ghaziabad, Kanpur, Lucknow, Moradabad, Saharanpur, and Varanasi have been tending deeper into ‘critical’ or ‘over-exploited’ standing lately. In Barmer, Jaisalmer, and Jodhpur of west Rajasthan, deep wells and stepwells are already overdrawn to help their rising populations.

This half of the State additionally accommodates the Thar desert, which implies the pure subterranean sources of water are ‘fossil water’: water that amassed right here when the area’s local weather was completely different from what it’s at the moment and has not been recharged over time.

In the west, Ahmedabad, Surat, and Rajkot in Gujarat and Pune and Nagpur in Maharashtra are rising too quick for his or her groundwater reserves to maintain up. While Mumbai subsists on floor reservoirs, the demand for groundwater in close by Thane and Navi Mumbai is booming — echoing the plight of Noida and Gurugram close to Delhi. Similar narratives are additionally taking part in out in Indore, Bhopal, and Dehradun.

In Patna, city sprawl and insufficient floor water distribution are the most important drivers. Both Kolkata’s and Nagapattinam’s groundwater has change into saline as a result of over-extraction has allowed water from the Bay of Bengal to move inward. Such seawater threatens Kochi and Visakhapatnam as properly.

Bengaluru’s current progress has lower forward of its water infrastructure. All blocks in the district are ‘over-exploited’. In March 2024, Indian Institute of Science researchers reported that in 5 many years, Bengaluru’s built-up space had elevated by 1,055% at the expense of 79% of its lake floor space. Many lakes that also stay are additionally extremely polluted. The metropolis’s newer suburbs don’t but have connections to water from the Cauvery river, so in addition they resort to borewells. During an uncharacteristically sizzling passage in early 2024, it emerged that half of the metropolis’s 14,000 or so borewells had been dry regardless of some having plunged to 450 m.

Chennai can be a coastal metro like Mumbai, but as of 2023 it was drawing 127.5% of its annual groundwater recharge. This is alarming even whether it is higher than the 133% in 2022. All however 5 of the metropolis’s 51 income blocks had been ‘over-exploited’. The quantity of water in its most important reservoirs stays depending on seasonal rainfall. Among India’s States, Tamil Nadu adopted necessary rainwater harvesting early, in 2003, and has additionally put in many new desalination vegetation, but Chennai’s groundwater ranges stay precarious.

Hyderabad is considerably higher positioned with giant reservoirs and an arguably higher piped community — but groundwater ranges dropped 2-7 m between 2023 and 2024 alone in elements of Greater Hyderabad.

Tragedy of the commons

The Green Revolution inspired farmers to rotate crops between rice and wheat to enhance India’s meals safety in the Sixties. But at the same time as farmers got here to rely on these crops, their capital prices elevated. Rice is especially ill-suited for the area’s semi-arid local weather. A 2002 examine from researchers at Wageningen University estimated that “it takes 3,000-5,000 litres to produce 1 kg of rice, … about two- to three-times more than to produce 1 kg of other cereals such as wheat or maize.”

Land beneath rice and sugarcane monocultures additionally consumes water all through the yr reasonably than being allowed to change between water-intensive and water-sparse crops (like millets and pulses). This stress is compounded by inefficient cropping and irrigation practices. Most farmers in the nation nonetheless use flood irrigation to water their fields: even when some of this water percolates into the floor, it’s inadequate justification to extract it in the first place.

Many farmers additionally steer clear of micro-irrigation choices and pump extra water than the crops really want. They additionally lose pumped water when it ‘leaks’ from poorly maintained canals and watercourses, which implies farmers desire utilizing tubewells nearer to their crops even when canal water is accessible. They have additionally been reluctant to undertake much less water-intensive methods to domesticate rice.

Over the years, each the Union and State governments have eliminated financial alerts to preserve water by offering subsidised electrical energy for agricultural use and thru their procurement insurance policies. Free or low-cost energy has allowed the space of land beneath crops to extend linearly with the quantity of pumps. There have even been experiences of farmers in Punjab and Haryana working their pumps after their watering wants have been met simply to exhaust their free energy quota or to promote the water.

Second, prevailing help costs and state commitments to purchase rice and wheat create a perverse incentive to develop them even in areas the place they’re unsuitable. Governments have additionally as a matter of conference supported credit score insurance policies that favour irrigation improvement, which has primarily taken the type of pumps reasonably than, say, drip or sprinkler methods. In all, state financial insurance policies have separated groundwater over-extraction from its penalties.

Further, agriculture has mixed with urbanisation of late to doubly stress groundwater reserves when beforehand just one stressor operated. As cities and cities develop, they sink extra municipal wells and personal boreholes into the floor. At a given depth under the floor, there’s a finite and shared useful resource of water. If it’s depleted, it’s depleted for all attainable customers directly.

The Central Ground Water Authority has notified sure ‘over-exploited’ blocks the place new business wells are banned — but enforcement at the farm-level can be uncommon. According to the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, “only about 14% of the overexploited blocks in the country” had been notified as such in 2021.

Unlike with the nation’s forests and aboveground water sources like rivers, neighborhood administration of groundwater stays feeble. The useful resource is successfully at the mercy of crores of particular person choices constructing as much as a tragedy of the commons: given the info of drainage and low-cost energy, farmers usually have an incentive to pump as a lot as they will to forestall others from ‘out-pumping’ them. On the flip facet, wherever significant community-led motion has arisen, groundwater over-extraction has stopped, if not rotated.

In reality, community-led motion is essential as a result of of how over-extraction impacts individuals. As the water desk recedes from the floor, the energy price of pumping water will increase. Farmers want stronger pumps (to deal with the increased voltage however which additionally pollute the air extra), longer pipes, larger loans, and better earnings. Smallholders change into notably in danger of falling in debt.

The water they finally pull up is of low high quality. Such water has already been recognized to cut back crop yield in Punjab by 30%. Disappearing aquifers at particular strata flip perennial rivers seasonal. Trees’ roots cease discovering water, resulting in extra erosion, worse floods, and extra arid land. Open land and wetlands are changed by concrete and asphalt, inflicting rainwater to change into floor runoff reasonably than refill for aquifers. Cities tax water use, leaving the poorer in the lurch. People migrate away. State economics shrink, incomes fall, and households are displaced. Even the land might buckle and subside.

What to the rescue?

Governments have met India’s groundwater disaster with a panoply of insurance policies, programmes, guidelines, and rules to various levels of success. Their collective goals are to extend provide, cut back demand, and regulate consumption.

Chief amongst them is the Union authorities’s Atal Bhujal Yojana, a.ok.a. Atal Jal. Launched in 2020 with an outlay of ₹6,000 crore over 5 years, the scheme focuses on constructing community-led groundwater administration in seven goal States that collectively include a 3rd of India’s most water-stressed blocks (but it surely excludes Punjab). Access to its funds is tied to bettering groundwater ranges and community-led adoption of water-saving practices. By early 2023, the scheme had launched round a fifth of its funds, pointing to sluggish uptake, in all probability resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. If the scheme scales up as supposed, its largest upside might be decentralising motion to enhance groundwater ranges.

Second, the Union and State governments mooted the Jal Shakti Abhiyan in 2019. Every yr, the mission identifies water-stressed districts and helps improve rainwater harvesting, upkeep and restore of conventional water our bodies and watersheds, and the forest cowl there. In 2024, the mission recognized 151 water-stressed districts. According to official knowledge, the mission erected 98 lakh water-harvesting and -recharging constructions throughout India between 2019 and 2023.

Third, the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana is a nationwide scheme to enhance water-use effectivity in agriculture. Since 2015, when it was launched, it has been facilitating subsidies for micro-irrigation and different methods. Under the Yojana’s ‘Per Drop More Crop’ plan, in accordance with the Ministry of Agriculture, greater than 52 lakh hectares round the nation have been lined with drip and sprinkler irrigation methods. The Yojana additionally consists of incentives to exchange areas beneath paddy with maize and pulses, plus buy commitments.

In the similar vein, Haryana’s ‘Mera Pani Meri Virasat’ scheme pays farmers ₹2,800 per hectare to change from paddy to different crops in water-stressed blocks. According to State knowledge, some 23,000 hectares in Haryana had been diversified in 2022-2023 with this incentive. The Punjab State Power Corporation, Ltd. has additionally launched the ‘Pani Bachao, Paisa Kamao’ scheme whereby it immediately rewards farmers who eat much less energy.

In parallel, the CGWB has been mapping the nation’s aquifers. By 2023, it had lined 25 lakh sq. km with details about their depth and unfold, volumes, and high quality traits. The Board’s 2020 Master Plan for Artificial Recharge included a roadmap to put in 1.4 crore constructions to harness 185 BCM of rainwater throughout the nation. In its present section, the mapping train is specializing in creating options for areas labeled as ‘over-exploited’ and/or the place the groundwater high quality is poor.

Finally, rules. In 2020, the Union authorities revised its tips to tighten norms surrounding groundwater extraction for industrial and infrastructural use, particularly in ‘over-exploited’ areas. They required industries, city utilities, and huge housing tasks to obtain ‘no objection certificates’ provided that in addition they met circumstances to reap rainwater and restore groundwater. Bylaws in Chennai and Mumbai require all giant buildings to have rainwater harvesting constructions and useful recharge pits. With assist from NGOs, Pune has mapped its aquifers to regulate groundwater extraction at the neighborhood stage.

To bolster State-level enforcement, Raj Bhushan Choudhary, the Union Minister of State for Jal Shakti, mentioned in 2024 that the Ministry had circulated a “model Bill to all the States/UTs to enable them to enact suitable groundwater legislation for regulation of its development, which also includes provision of rainwater harvesting. So far, 21 States/UTs have adopted and implemented the groundwater legislation, including the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh”.

In Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, new wells must be registered with the respective State authorities. In Gujarat, the Jyotigram Yojana goals to supply 24-hour, three-phase energy provide to rural areas — and concurrently limits the hours of provide to water pumps. Haryana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana even have State-level schemes that promote community-led restoration of water tanks to save lots of extra rainwater and mitigate floor runoff.