What led to the overuse of ground water in India?
Answers
Answer:
New solutions
Apart from agroforestry and optimisation of water use for irrigation, several promising new technological solutions – including those mentioned at the start of this article – are in the offing.
Clearly, the world is paying attention to the food-water-energy nexus and working hard on innovative solutions to tackle the most pressing issues of water quality and quantity as well as precision agricultural approaches and novel bacterial bio-fertilisers that will increase yield while reducing fertiliser use and irrigation.
The intricate and hard-to-predict cascades in the water-food-energy nexus have the potential to be a disaster in the making for India, but also provide enormous opportunities to get our scientific, technological, and entrepreneurial juices gushing.
Need to study
The so-called food-water-energy nexus has been studied for three different regions of India by an Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai group led by Subimal Ghosh. This study should serve as a template for extending the approach to smaller regions with further data gathering and modelling to drive science, technology and policy tools to address this dire situation in the making for the food-water-energy nexus which will be fully conflated with health and nutrition issues as well as the downward trend in the monsoon and the multi-fold increase in extreme weather.
The optimistic view would be that India’s investment in science and technology will pay off by the development and implementation of indigenous solutions and also by rapid adaptation and scaling up of solutions developed elsewhere. Transition to sustainable agriculture and watershed management approaches such as agroforestry are a must now. While agroforestry has been the method of rural development for many non-governmental organisations, government incentives are needed for much wider implementation of this approach, especially in drought-prone regions such as North Karnataka, Vidharba and Marathwada.
This is critical considering the fundamental physics of the climate system – regions of low mean rainfall tend to have much higher variability than regions with high mean rainfa
The averages over such a large population can be misleading since they hide many externalities such as poverty and gender issues that limit access to food and the gobbling up of agricultural land for urbanisation. Also, mostly unseen are the impacts of agriculture and fertiliser use on soil health and water quality.
But much more insidious is the impact on water quantity itself, due to the fact that the area under irrigation has grown from under 20% in the 1950s to just over 50% at present.
The Green Revolution got India out of stark poverty and hunger by the 1970s, though malnutrition is still a serious issue. The seasonal monsoon predictions used to correspond well to the total grain production with excess and deficit in grain production directly corresponding to the excess and deficit in the summer monsoon rainfall. The kharif (summer) season used to produce more than twice the tonnage of grains than the rabi (winter) season during the nascent years of independent India but now the two seasons are nearly equal in grain production.