[Assam] From NY Times

[Chan Mahanta]

  India Digs Deeper, but Wells Are Drying Up, and a Farming Crisis Looms

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: September 30, 2006


TEJA KA BAS, India - Bhanwar Lal Yadav, once a cultivator of cucumber 
and wheat, has all but given up growing food. No more suffering 
through drought and the scourge of antelope that would destroy what 
little would survive on his fields.
Thirsty Giant
Second of three articles.
Articles in this series examine India's growing water crisis. A 
previous article looked at urban water and sanitation problems. 
Sunday: Floods and how to harvest ample rains.
Multimedia
Video
Part 1: Water Woes in India
Video
Part 2: Water Woes in India


Today he has reinvented himself as a vendor of what counts here as 
the most precious of commodities: the water under his land here.

Each year he bores ever deeper. His well now reaches 130 feet down. 
Four times a day he starts up his electric pumps. The water that 
gurgles up, he sells to the local government - 13,000 gallons a day. 
What is left, he sells to thirsty neighbors. He reaps handsomely, and 
he plans to continue for as long as it lasts.

"However long it runs, it runs," he said. "We know we will all be 
ultimately doomed."

Mr. Yadav's words could well prove prophetic for his country. Efforts 
like his - multiplied by some 19 million wells nationwide - have 
helped India deplete its groundwater at an alarming pace over the 
last few decades.

The country is running through its groundwater so fast that scarcity 
could threaten whole regions like this one, drive people off the land 
and ultimately stunt the country's ability to farm and feed its 
people.

With the population soaring past one billion and with a driving need 
to boost agricultural production, Indians are tapping their 
groundwater faster than nature can replenish it, so fast that they 
are hitting deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs.

"What we will do?" wondered Pavan Agarwal, an assistant engineer with 
the state Public Health and Engineering Department, as he walked 
across a stretch of dusty fields near Mr. Yadav's water farm. "We 
have to deliver water."

He swept his arms across the field, dotted with government wells. 
This one, dug 10 years ago, had already gone dry. In that one, the 
water had sunk down to 130 feet. If it were not for the fact that 
electricity comes only five hours a day, every farmer in the area, 
Mr. Agarwal ventured, would be pumping round the clock.

Saving for a Dry Day

If groundwater can be thought of as a nation's savings account for 
dry, desperate drought years, then India, which has more than its 
share of them, is rapidly exhausting its reserve. That situation is 
true in a growing number of states.

Indian surveyors have divided the country into 5,723 geographic 
blocks. More than 1,000 are considered either overexploited, meaning 
more water is drawn on average than is replenished by rain, or 
critical, meaning they are dangerously close to it.

Twenty years ago, according to the Central Groundwater Board, only 
250 blocks fell into those categories.

"We have come to the worst already," was the verdict of A. Sekhar, 
who until recently was an adviser on water to the Planning Commission 
of India. At this rate, he projected, the number of areas at risk is 
most likely to double in the next dozen years.

  Across India, where most people still live off the land, the chief 
source of irrigation is groundwater, at least for those who can 
afford to pump it.

Here in Jaipur District, a normally parched area west of New Delhi 
known for its regal palaces, farmers depend on groundwater almost 
exclusively. Across Rajasthan State, where Jaipur is located, up to 
80 percent of the groundwater blocks are in danger of running out.

But even fertile, rain-drenched pockets of the country are not immune.

Consider, for instance, that in Punjab, India's northern breadbasket 
state, 79 percent of groundwater blocks are classified as 
overexploited or critical; in neighboring Haryana, 59 percent; and in 
southern tropical Tamil Nadu, 46 percent.

The crisis has been exacerbated by good intentions gone awry and poor 
planning by state governments, which are responsible for regulating 
water.

Indian law has virtually no restrictions on who can pump groundwater, 
how much and for what purpose. Anyone, it seems, can - and does - 
extract water as long as it is under his or her patch of land. That 
could apply to homeowner, farmer or industry.

Electric pumps have accelerated the problem, enabling farmers and 
others to squeeze out far more groundwater than they had been able to 
draw by hand for hundreds of years.

The spread of free or vastly discounted electricity has not helped, 
either. A favorite boon of politicians courting the rural vote, the 
low rates have encouraged farmers, especially those with large 
landholdings, to pump out groundwater with abandon.

"We forgot that water is a costly item," lamented K. P. Singh, 
regional director of the Central Groundwater Board, in his office in 
the city of Jaipur. "Our feeling about proper, judicious use of water 
vanished."

The Politics of Water

With the proliferation of electric pumps, he added, it took only 20 
years for Rajasthan's groundwater reserves to sink to their current 
levels. Twenty more years of the same policy could be catastrophic.

The central government has been coaxing states to require the 
harvesting of rainwater, for instance by installing tanks or digging 
ponds, so the water will seep into the earth and recharge the 
aquifers.

Other solutions are politically trickier. Prime Minister Manmohan 
Singh has warned of the consequences of free or cheap electricity and 
urged state officials to crack down on pumping. But state officials, 
attuned to potential backlash, have been slow to respond.

Tighter restrictions would in any case run up against one of the 
government's top priorities, one that India has long considered vital 
for its independence: the goal of growing its own food.

The fear now, among those who study Indian agriculture, is that 
without a careful review of water policy and a switch to crops that 
use less water, India stands to imperil its food production.

Here in the dust bowl of Rajasthan, desperate water times have 
already called for desperate water measures.

On a parched, hot morning not far from Mr. Yadav's home, a train 
pulled into the railway station at a village called Peeplee Ka Bas. 
Here, the wells have run dry and the water table fallen so low that 
it is too salty even to irrigate the fields.

The train came bearing precious cargo: 15 tankers loaded with nearly 
120,000 gallons of clean, sweet drinking water.

The water regularly travels more than 150 miles, taking nearly two 
days, by pipeline and then by rail, so that the residents of a small 
neighboring town can fill their buckets with water for 15 minutes 
every 48 hours.

It is a logistically complicated, absurdly expensive proposition. 
Bringing the water here costs the state around a penny a gallon; the 
state charges the consumer a monthly flat rate of 58 cents for 5,283 
gallons, absorbing the loss.

A Parched Village

The growing water shortage has transformed life in Peeplee Ka Bas. 
Its men left long ago to seek work elsewhere. The women remain to 
spend the blistering summer mornings digging ponds in the barren 
earth, hoping to catch monsoon rains.

Where farming once provided a livelihood, now digging puts food on 
the table. For a day's labor, under this public works program 
intended to help the poorest families, each woman is paid the 
equivalent of 40 cents, along with 24 pounds of wheat.

It was not always this way. Once farming made sense. Many of the 
women digging on a recent morning remembered growing their own food - 
peas, tomatoes, chili peppers, watermelons - and selling it, too, at 
the nearest town market.

Year by year, the wells began to run dry. And there were several 
years of little to no rain.

Meera, a mother of three who uses only one name, who is lucky enough 
to come from a landowning family, still watched her husband leave the 
village to find work in a cement factory.

There were times, she acknowledged, when it became difficult to feed 
the children. Now she finds herself digging ponds for a bag of wheat. 
And praying for rain. "Our life is not life," Meera said. "Only when 
it rains, there's life."

A half-hour's drive along a narrow country road, just next door to 
Mr. Yadav's water farm, live a pair of brothers, Nandalal and 
Jeevanlal Chowdhury.

They have so far resisted following Mr. Yadav's lead in selling what 
water is left under their land, mainly because it requires a hefty 
investment to buy pumps. This year, the water in their well dropped 
to 130 feet, twice as deep as 10 years ago.

Only millet grows here now, a crop that takes relatively little 
water, and cattle fodder. Their last vegetable harvest was five years 
ago.

They know they will not go on farming forever. The water will not 
last. They will search for other work, elsewhere. Jeevanlal Chowdhury 
was vague on what prospects the land would hold for his children.

"We are close to the finishing point," he said. His daughter, a sixth 
grader, listened intently to the conversation. "The water is almost 
gone."