India's Groundwater Crisis: A Case of Poor "Diagnosis"

M. Dinesh Kumar, A Narayanamoorthy and Mahendra Singh Verma

If one says that the state of affairs in India with regard to groundwater is sad, it will be an understatement. It is actually pathetic and unimaginable. On the one hand, hardly a day goes with the media reports about the problems of falling groundwater levels and water scarcity in part of the country or the other. The media frenzy is about the public, which while drawing a lot of water from the wells, is not putting back enough water underground. The panic button is pressed when in the water table in city, A or City B drops by a few feet. It is as if the water table should never drop and even if it happens, we as citizens are all duty bound to do this ritual of recharging groundwater day in and day out!

In contrast, we keep reading various media reports about the successful initiatives to recharge groundwater locally using water from roof tops, streets and local watersheds, with some claiming to have turned such programmes into a ‘mass movement’. Such reports also include interviews of some ‘extra ordinary’ men and women solving water problems of some regions or even states using some simple principles and practices. The media hype would create a feeling in the minds of ordinary folks that such a large-scale participation of common people might not have been witnessed even for the freedom movement.

Yet it will be rare to find anyone questioning the veracity of these reports. The point is two contradicting claims cannot be right. If both are right, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the approach, i.e., recharging groundwater locally! So, what is the truth? In the answer to this question lies the root cause of India’s groundwater crisis.

A Crisis of Information

First of all, the mass media has made most of us think that water table should never fall, because we are not informed by the same media when water levels rise, or at least not as many times as they report about falling water levels in our neighbourhood! So, most of us do not consider water table fluctuation to be part of the hydrological process, though this has been happening for centuries. Even at a time when there was no groundwater use, water levels fell gradually after a rise that occurs as a result of rains, due to discharge into streams and other natural sinks. This is how the hydrological balance is maintained. What has changed over centuries is the rate at which the fall happens. The recharge that occurs during the monsoon is pumped out in a short duration of 4-5 months in most of the problem areas, leaving little for summer. Of course, there are some areas which experience long-term decline in water table in spite of the monsoonal fluctuations.

Over the past three decades, we have witnessed various initiatives from governments, civil society groups, spiritual and religious organizations, NGOs and private individuals implementing groundwater recharge schemes in the water-scarce regions of the country. They all try to prove the effectiveness of these interventions by showing the observed ‘dramatic rise in water levels’ in the wells located in the vicinity of these structures, during the monsoon. Often the estimates would surprise anyone to the extent that to get such a huge rise, one should expect the rainfall to be 10 times more than what the region actually receives.

But what we do not reckon with is the fact that after the monsoon, groundwater levels rise throughout the country. A quick look at the water level contour maps produced by the Central Ground Water Board, which monitors water levels in around 28,000 wells spread across the country, will illustrate this point. Higher the rainfall in an area, higher will the rise in water level, though not linear (beyond a point it also won’t increase). A more accurate method to evaluate the impact is to compare the average water level rise in wells in the vicinity of the recharge structure with those which are not in the influence area of the structures. But this is hardly ever done as this would expose the fallacy.

The ‘doomsday prophecy’ is that the country’s groundwater would be permanently depleted if we continue with the current levels of abstraction. Occasional predictions of ‘day-zero’ for several cities is are also made. The argument has no scientific basis. The aquifers get certain amount of recharge during the monsoon season. They also get replenished from irrigation return flows, and the water stored in the millions of small and large water bodies. The groundwater in our country is a renewable resource. So long as there is precipitation, there will be recharge, though at the aggregate level the quantum will vary slightly depending on annual rainfall variation. The annual recharge in India estimated by CGWB is around 447 BCM--based on five-year average.       

A Crisis of Science and Technology

As problems of groundwater over-exploitation (including land subsidence) were faced by some regions of developed countries several decades ago (in western US, Great Artesian basin of Australia, La Mancha aquifer in Spain, etc.), discussions on arresting depletion had initially focused on artificial recharge. The idea was of diverting flood waters from another basin or using highly treated wastewater or urban storm water for recharging aquifers through large ‘spreading-basins’ and injection wells. The technique was tried in California, Texas, Florida and Arizona in the US, Dan region of Israel and many parts of Australia. It was understood that no water would be available for recharging in the regions which face overdraft problems for recharging. In some cases, the concept of ‘replacement water’ is also used. In the case of western La Mancha aquifer, in order to discourage farmers from aquifer mining, desalinated water was offered at a price lower than the cost incurred by farmers for pumping deep groundwater.

China, which started facing groundwater over-draft problems, is now into mega projects like South-North Water transfer (from Yangtze to Yellow river) which is implemented on a war footing to augment water resources for irrigation and urban water supplies in the north China plains, whose water resources supports not only vibrant agriculture, but also a highly industrialized urban economy.

But the ‘homegrown’ solution offered in India is local, small-scale water harvesting and recharge. The basic concept is of using runoff water available from the same locality for recharging the aquifers which are mined by the farmers. If farmers themselves do it, it is even better (the philosophy is that one who poisoned finds an antivenom)! But none seems to ask the commonsensical question: ‘If a lot of surplus water is available from the local catchment for recharging the aquifers, why do farmers go so deep to tap groundwater, and instead why can’t they use water directly from the surface catchment?’ Surprisingly, such prescriptions are made during drought years, when no water is available from local catchments. The widespread impression that is created by the champions of ‘groundwater recharging’, who work like evangelists, is that a lot of water from the monsoon rains flows out of these water-scarce regions and drain into the ocean. The final outcome is the creation of millions of small water bodies which evaporate as much water as it captures, resulting in desiccation.

Even more appalling is the plan for afforestation with millions of trees in water-scarce regions. But we hardly recognize the fact that trees are biological pumps which can tap water not only from soils and shallow groundwater, but also from the deeper strata depending on the rooting.

However, when large scale recharge schemes are implemented using water imported from water-surplus regions (like water from Narmada and Mahi rivers in South Gujarat for recharging aquifers in the alluvial areas of north Gujarat), they hardly get any media attention.

While in the western world, a lot of research had been undertaken to study the performance of artificial recharge schemes and impact of recharge on groundwater levels and water quality using physical and mathematical models, we have over-simplified the problem and made everyone believe that it is easy for anyone to do, without worrying about the quality of water being injected, storage space in the aquifer or the ‘hydraulic diffusivity’, etc. To popularize the idea, in 2005, the central government was persuaded to launch a ‘scheme’ wherein every farmer was given Rs. 4,000 for building a recharge installation for his/her farm well. When the entire scheme turned out to be a colossal disaster, blame was put on the ‘lack of official interest’, ‘lack of people’s participation in programme implementation’, etc. Basically, no questions should be raised about the ‘flawed concept’ on which the scheme was designed. 

A Crisis of Institutions

Yet the most frustrating part of the groundwater management debate in India is about the nature of institutions that are advocated for management. The influential opinion makers vouch on ‘community ownership and management of groundwater’ as an effective model. Yet, it is not clear what the objectives and criteria for such a management model will be. The very definition of the ‘community’ remains unclear. Even when it is defined, what knowledge, capacities and skills would be needed by this community to affect resource management, which basically requires major behaviour change among thousands of individual users? Therefore, the argument is juvenile. 

The key issue is: in the absence of a law governing the use of groundwater, who would decide on the rights of the users to abstract the resource under this ‘management regime’? The role of the state under the proposed management regime also remains unclear. So, believing that an invisible and dynamic resource like groundwater, with an open access, could be completely managed by the ‘community’ is just a flight of fancy. Yet this utopian idea is being paraded in the seminar circuits and mass media for many years now.

Parallelly, to create an impression that government is seriously concerned about groundwater over-draft, the groundwater departments of some states periodically churn out legislative measures called ‘Groundwater Regulation Act’, as a ritual. There is not even an iota of evidence to the effect that they are being implemented. The administrative set up just doesn’t exist to enforce whatever little is there as ‘legal provisions’ in these Acts. The reality is that these legislations by their very nature are vacuous as they do not address the fundamental issue of legal right to use groundwater, while de facto, this right is attached to land ownership rights. However, without realizing the legal context that groundwater is a state subject in India, blame is put on the ‘highly ineffective’ Central Ground Water Board’ as it fails to regulate groundwater use in the country!

This being the state of affairs in India, many countries, including China are seriously investing in the development of institutions and instruments for groundwater management. The focus is on creating legal frameworks (like the recent attempts in California), setting up of legitimate formal institutions and use of market instruments. In China, a variety of institutional interventions are being piloted--metering and volumetric pricing of groundwater (resource fee) and enforcing a water rights system among well irrigators to find out which is more effective in achieving demand reduction.

Conclusions

To conclude the attempts to manage India’s groundwater are ad-hoc, directionless and half-hearted. It is as if, the entire work of ‘aquifer management’ is a one-time job and can be done before the arrival of monsoon. The ‘clarion call’ by the NITI Ayog to build millions of small storage structures and plant trees is the latest example. There is too much resistance to investing in advancing the science of managing the resource. The tendency is to oversimplify complex problems for which answers will have to be found from disciplines as varied as groundwater hydrology, behaviour science and institutional economics.

M. Dinesh Kumar is Executive Director, Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad. A Narayanamoorthy is Senior Professor and Head, Department of Economics and Rural Development, Alagappa University, Tamil Nadu. Mahendra Singh Verma is Advisor-Projects and Partnership, IRAP, respectively. The views expressed are personal. Email for correspondence: [email protected]