Can improved agricultural water use efficiency save India’s groundwater?

Abstract

Irrigated agriculture is placing increasing pressure on finite freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, where water extraction is often unregulated, un-priced and even subsidized. To shift agriculture to a more sustainable use of water without harming the food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholders, substantial improvements of water use efficiency will be required. Here, we use detailed hydroclimatic and agricultural data to estimate the potential for the widespread adoption of efficient irrigation technologies to halt the depletion of India's groundwater resources. Even though we find substantial technical potential for reversing water table declines, we show that the impacts are highly sensitive to assumptions about farmers' water use decisions. For example, we find that widespread adoption of proven technologies that include drip and sprinkler irrigation has the potential to reduce the amount of excessive extraction of groundwater by two thirds. However, under more realistic assumptions about farmers' irrigation choices, half of these reductions are lost due to the expansion of irrigated area. Our results suggest that without the introduction of incentives for conservation, much of the potential impact of technology adoption on aquifers may be lost. The analysis provides quantitative input to the debate of incentive versus technology based water policies.

Participatory Irrigation Management and Irrigation Water Use Efficiency in Maize Production: Evidence from Zhangye City, Northwestern China

“…The robust positive relationship between groundwater use and IWUE indicates that groundwater use in irrigation helps to improve IWUE. This is in line with previous studies, that IWUE is relatively high in areas irrigated by groundwater and lower in surface water areas [10,46].…”

Water–food–energy nexus with changing agricultural scenarios in India during recent decades

“…Sufficient groundwater for irrigation is made available to the farmers, along with energy at a low or no tariff, no matter to what depth the groundwater may fall (Mukherji and Shah, 2005;Badiani et al, 2012;Fishman et al, 2015;Zaveri et al, 2016). Such schemes were in place during the Green Revolution and there have been no major changes in them to date (Mukherji and Shah, 2005;Badiani et al, 2012;Fishman et al, 2015;Zaveri et al, 2016). The brunt of the availability of subsidised energy is borne by the Government of India (GoI) (Kumar, 2005;Rattan and Biswas, 2014).…”

“…The Green Revolution has been blamed for falling groundwater levels due to overexploitation of groundwater storage through uncontrolled pumping and energy made available at a subsidised rate (Mukherji and Shah, 2005;Badiani et al, 2012;Fishman et al, 2015;Zaveri et al, 2016). The Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) of India, which is responsible for monitoring the well depths, provides observations four times in a year, which made it impossible to have a continuous set of observations to analyse the fluctuations.…”

Farm Typology in the Berambadi Watershed (India): Farming Systems Are Determined by Farm Size and Access to Groundwater

“…Policies to improve agricultural water use efficiency are often found to be inefficient when there are designed without taking into account the whole system, including farmer's choices, as shown for example by Fishman et al [2], in the case of irrigation technologies.…”