Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Every year the rainfall figure is reported and every year the aquifer figure is not, although only one of them is recoverable. This season the two overlap almost exactly, and the overlap is the argument. India’s June–July rainfall finished about 13 per cent below normal, with the deepest shortfalls in Punjab at 38 per cent, Haryana at 31 per cent and Uttar Pradesh at 28 per cent. Those are, very nearly, the same states where the water table has been falling longest.
Begin with the national accounts, because they are less alarming than the regional picture and it matters to say so. India’s annual groundwater recharge is assessed at more than 446 billion cubic metres; annual extraction for all uses is about 245 billion cubic metres. At the aggregate level the country extracts a little over half of what it recharges, and the most recent assessments recorded recharge rising by around 15 billion cubic metres while extraction fell by about three — genuinely good news, and the product of a decade of watershed work, recharge structures and improved irrigation efficiency. But groundwater is not a national resource in any usable sense. It is thousands of local aquifers, and roughly 17 per cent of assessment units are classified as over-exploited, with a further 5 per cent critical and 14 per cent semi-critical. Those categories cluster in the north-west, the west and parts of the southern peninsula — and the north-western cluster is the same belt that grew a paddy–wheat rotation on a semi-arid plain by pumping.
The compounding cost of a dry year: where rainfall falls short, pumping makes up the difference — which is why a weather deficit in the north-west turns into an aquifer deficit that no later rainfall reverses.
Rain that does not fall this year can fall next year. Water pumped out of an aquifer this year is not coming back on that schedule.
At a Glance
• Annual recharge: assessed at more than 446 billion cubic metres
• Annual extraction: about 245 billion cubic metres for all uses
• Recent movement: recharge up about 15 BCM; extraction down about 3 BCM
• Assessment units: about 17% over-exploited, 5% critical, 14% semi-critical
• Dependence: groundwater supplies roughly 62% of irrigation, 85% of rural drinking water and 50% of urban supply
• This season: June–July rainfall about 13% below normal — Punjab −38%, Haryana −31%, Uttar Pradesh −28%
• August outlook: 97% of the long period average, ±9%
The mechanism connecting the two numbers is simple and is the reason this is a structural story rather than a seasonal one. When the monsoon under-delivers in an irrigated belt, the crop does not fail — the farmer pumps. The shortfall is transferred, quietly and immediately, from the sky to the aquifer, where it does not show up in any figure published that season. A dry year in a rainfed district produces a visible loss and a relief response; a dry year in Punjab produces a normal harvest and an invisible withdrawal. Over three decades of such years, that is how a water table falls by metres while the state’s production statistics look reassuring.
What works is known, tested in India, and unglamorous. The first instrument is procurement, not advice: farmers move out of paddy in the canal belt when there is an assured buyer for maize, pulses or oilseeds to move into — crops India also imports in volume, which makes this one policy answering two problems. The second is metered, subsidised-but-not-free power for agricultural pumping with the saving returned as a direct transfer, so the farmer keeps the money and the aquifer keeps the water. Punjab and a handful of other states have run versions of this and the results are encouraging. The third is managed aquifer recharge at scale — check dams, farm ponds, recharge shafts in the very blocks classified over-exploited — funded as infrastructure rather than as drought relief. The IMD expects a near-normal August, at 97 per cent of the long period average. That means this season will most likely end better than it began, which makes the next eight weeks the right moment to build. Good water years are for building. That is the entire lesson of the ones that were not.
