Invisible water, visible impact: groundwater use and Indian agriculture under climate change

Abstract

India is one of the world's largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India's agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India's food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India's agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.

Benefits and pitfalls of GRACE data assimilation: A case study of terrestrial water storage depletion in India

“…India is the world's largest user of groundwater resources [Aeschbach-Hertig and Gleeson, 2012], and irrigation accounts for more than 85% of its groundwater withdrawals [Food and Agriculture Organization, 2013]. The current rate of groundwater consumption is unsustainable and may eventually increase poverty and food insecurity in rural India [Zaveri et al, 2016]. Monitoring these risks is essential in this era of rapid socioeconomic growth and climate change.…”

The use and re-use of unsustainable groundwater for irrigation: a global budget

“…Both satellite-and model-based estimates of global groundwater depletion show that aquifers in important agricultural regionsincluding parts of India, China, and the U.S., the world's largest food producing nations-are losing mass [1,[3][4][5][6][7], and cannot continue providing current levels of groundwater supplies indefinitely. Unsustainable groundwater provides as much as ∽20% of global irrigation water supplies [4,6], and in both China and India this water is directly responsible for approximately one quarter of crop production [8,9]. Groundwater pumping increases surface water storage volumes and river fluxes over several major agricultural aquifer regions, including the High Plains aquifer in North America, the North China Plain, and parts of north-west India [2].…”

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.…”