GLOBAL WATER CRISES NEED RADICAL RETHINK

A water crisis is brewing in the agriculture sector worldwide, resulting from its over-use and climate change and India is no exception.

- C P RAJENDRAN

Farmers around the world are on an agitation path. In Europe, they raise issues such as falling prices, rising costs, heavy regulation, domineering retailers, debt and cheap imports. Climate change is also a matter of contention. While extreme events such as floods and droughts have become a huge burden for farmers, they also protest the environmental regulations put forth by the European Union seeking to ameliorate the impact of climate change.

The Indian farmers raise demands such as minimum support price, debt waiver and scrapping of the Electricity Amendment Bill 2020. Their concern for other marginalised communities is reflected in their demand for protection for land, forests and water sources belonging to tribal communities. That said, equally important is the rapidly depleting groundwater reserves across India that will have a deleterious impact on overall agricultural productivity, which finds no mention in their demands.

Take the case of Punjab a key state for agricultural productivity. Out of the state's 138 water blocks, more than 100 have already reached a critical stage for over-exploitation some blocks exceed groundwater extraction by 200 percent, a few even over 400 percent. Since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, groundwater has played a vital role in irrigating water-hungry crops such as rice to feed the country's growing population. But this was conditional on the overuse of fertilisers and over-dependence on groundwater. Reduced availability in India due to groundwater depletion and climate change could threaten the livelihoods of more than a third of the country's 1.4 billion people.