The Desert is Coming

Once India's agricultural powerhouse, Punjab now faces severe water scarcity and desertification due to over-reliance on paddy and excessive groundwater extraction.

- Pankaj Chaturvedi

Growing concerns about the possibility of Punjab turning into a desert later in this century can scarcely be dismissed as alarmist any longer.

The declining water levels in all the five rivers in the state and the dams not storing water to their full capacity are eloquent testimony that something is very wrong.

Availability of water in the rivers has decreased from 17-million-acrefeet to 13-million-acre-feet in recent years. The per capita usage of water in the state is also higher than in the rest of the country, 380 litres per day as against 150 litres elsewhere.

Experts blame the crisis on the emphasis on paddy cultivation, which yields higher returns. Indiscriminate use of pesticides and fertiliser and the growing demand for water to cultivate paddy as more and more farmers took to it, they say, led to the present precarious situation. The demand for water for agriculture has grown to 43.7 lakh hectare meter and 73 per cent of it are raised from ground water.

During the hearing of a PIL in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, a survey conducted in each block by the Central Ground Water Board in 2020 was cited. The survey concluded that the state's groundwater level would go down below 300 meters from the surface by 2039. Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) has been warning about this for the past several years. By studying monsoon data and rainfall patterns between 1971 and 2020, a research paper on climate change by this university stated that crops that use more water are creating conditions for 'desertification' by overcultivation, excessive exploitation of ground water, relatively little rainfall in the state despite the monsoon extending to four long months.