Profligate pumping is major threat to India’s water security

The tubewell came to India as a simple technology which gave farmers access to a reliable supply of water from the abundant aquifers that underlay their land.    The era of groundwater explosion began innocently enough – the expansion of electricity to rural areas in the 1970s allowed farmers to practice irrigation where canals did not reach, and to opt out of the institutionally-complex and increasingly corruption-ridden public irrigation systems.   The results have been spectacular.    Today, 70 percent of India’s irrigation needs and 80 percent of its domestic water supplies come from groundwater, tapped through more than 20 million tubewells.   But the very simplicity and success of the technology means that it has led to the profligate mining of groundwater, a phenomenon that has become a major threat to agriculture, human development and the environment in ever-large swathes stretching from Punjab to Maharashtra to Tamil Nadu. 

There is no better indicator of the failure of the public water supply system in India than the widespread extraction of groundwater. Farmers faced with the deteriorating conditions of canal systems have sunk tubewells in their fields, and city-dwellers faced with irregular, unpredictable and often polluted public water services have sunk wells in their backyards.   With large areas of India having substantial and easily-accessible aquifers, people have been able to ignore the inconvenience of poorly functioning public systems and “opt out” by using self-provided groundwater.

For some time government has been well aware of this looming crisis.  The National Commission on Water of 1999 has shown that overall water balances are precarious; that crisis situations already exist in a number of basins and that by 2050 India demands will exceed all available sources of supply. Already about 15 percent of all aquifers are in critical condition, a number which will grow to 60 percent in the next 25 years unless there is change.  

Since aquifer depletion is concentrated in many of the most populated and economically productive areas, the potential social and economic consequences of continuing this unchecked depletion are huge. The largest impact will be on agriculture. Over the last two decades, 84 percent of the total addition to net irrigated area came from groundwater, and only 16 percent from surface water canals. Thus, at present the net area irrigated by private tubewells is about double the area irrigated by canals. About 15 percent of India’s food is being produced using non-renewable, “mined”, groundwater.

The groundwater revolution brought immense benefits to India, playing a major role in the irrigation-rural development-poverty reduction cycle. A recent World Bank estimate has shown that poverty in irrigated districts was less than a third that in unirrigated districts.

That said, it is increasingly clear that the groundwater revolution has run its course in the most productive agricultural and urban areas of the economy. There are, more specifically, two major sustainability challenges. First is the contentious issue of the energy subsidies, and their inexorable increase in recent years. Some see it as the fundamental problem facing the electricity sector. According to the Planning Commission, while the agriculture sector accounts for nearly one-third of the sales of the state electricity boards, the revenues from farmers account for only 3 percent of total revenue. The World Bank estimates that subsidies to farmers account for about 10 percent of the total cost of supply, or about Rs 240 billion a year. This is equivalent to about 25 percent of India’s fiscal deficit and two and a half times the annual expenditure on canal irrigation.

The other, and perhaps even more pressing issue is that of the sustainability of the resource. At local levels many of the most highly productive localities are already under severe groundwater stress. For example, in Punjab, groundwater in about 60 percent of blocks is either already being, or very near to being, overdrawn, while for Haryana and Tamil Nadu, the figure is around 40 percent. In Rajasthan the proportion of over-exploited blocks has risen from 17 percent to 60 percent over the last seven years

What is needed is for government and users to work together to bring abstractions from groundwater in line with recharge. While traditional technologies such as rainwater harvesting and tanks can play an important local role, their advocates often sustain the wishful thinking that supply-side options (both large and small scale) can solve all problems.

The central task of continuing to use India’s groundwater to meet human and environmental needs in a sustainable manner will require three major changes from revitalized government water management agencies.  First, government will need to “do not harm”, by finding politically feasible approaches to reducing and eventually eliminating subsidies for electricity which stimulate greater and greater groundwater pumping.  Experience in other countries show that this must be done not by eliminating subsidies, but by substituting destructive subsidies with virtuous subsidies (for new water and agriculture technologies, for example).  

Second, government will have to play a new and active role in a new partnership with groundwater users -- to form empowered aquifer user associations; to formalize water entitlements which are consistent with the sustainable yield of the aquifer; to develop transparent information and decision support systems.  

Third, the end of the era of massive expansion in groundwater use is going to demand greater reliance on government-managed surface water supply systems. This is going to require recuperation of the large stock of dilapidated infrastructure and large-scale investment in public infrastructure of all scales. And it is going to require a dramatic transformation in the way in which public water services are provided to farmers, households and industries, in which, as described in a major recent World Bank report “India’s Water Economy: Facing a Turbulent Future”, the watchwords must be water entitlements, financial sustainability, accountability, competition, regulation and entry of alternatives to government provision, including cooperatives and the private sector.