05/07/2019 - Environment

KEY POINTS

·        Over 70 per cent of India’s water comes from below the ground. India is, by far, the largest and fastest growing consumer of groundwater in the world.

·        Over the last four decades, around 84 per cent of the addition to irrigated area came from groundwater.

·        Most of this was from deep drilling of tubewells or borewells, which are the single largest source of irrigation, as also drinking water, in both rural and urban India.

·        Tubewells, which were once seen as the solution to India’s water problem, have tragically ended up becoming the main cause of the crisis.

·        This is because we have indiscriminately drilled borewells without paying attention to aquifers, the rock formations within which our groundwater is stored.

·        Much of India is underlain by hard rock formations, which have limited capacity to store groundwater and have very low rates of natural recharge. Once we extract water from them, it takes very long for water to regain its original level.

·        It is also not often understood that perhaps the single most important cause of our peninsular rivers drying up is over-extraction of groundwater.

Remedial measures

·        Careful crop-water budgeting enabled them to switch to less water-intensive crops, more suited to their specific agro-ecology.

·        Such examples have mushroomed all over India, especially in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Kutch and Sikkim. All of them are based on collective action by farmers, who come together to jointly manage their precious shared resource.

·        They develop protocols for pumping of water, sequencing of water use, distance norms between wells and tubewells and strictly adhere to them once they understand that this is the only way they can manage to meet both their farm and domestic requirements.

·        Reviving ancient water harvesting structures like eris of TamilNadu, kulhs of Jammu and Kashmir, johads of Rajasthan.

·        Rain water harvesting systems in homes especially in urban areas.

·        Rationalizing the subsidy of free electricity, which aids reducing the usage of ground water.

·        Government subsequently launched the Atal Bhujal Yojana should be effectively implemented, for the involvement local communities in conserving water resources.

·        The Jyotigram Yojana of Gujarat shows the way forward here through the separation of power feeders.

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