How India is draining the aquifers it cannot see, and how it can stop

How India is draining the aquifers it cannot see, and how it can stop

In 2010, the water in the wells of Ardana, a village in Karnal district, Haryana, sat about eight metres below the ground. By 2020, government records put it at forty. That is a drop of nearly thirty-two metres in a decade, roughly the height of a ten-storey building, and a visitor walking through the village would have noticed nothing. The paddy was green. The tractors ran. The only thing that had changed was a number nobody could see, and it had changed the way a bank balance does when no one reads the statement.

That, to me, is the real shape of India’s water crisis. We talk about it as a problem of rivers, dams and rainfall, things we can see and argue about. But the water that actually keeps India alive is underground. Groundwater irrigates more than sixty percent of our farmland and supplies more than eighty percent of drinking water in rural areas. India pumps more of it than any other country on earth, roughly a quarter of the world’s total, and close to nine-tenths of what we pump goes to farms.

The latest national assessment, which the government placed before Parliament in July 2026, says India draws about 247 billion cubic metres a year, a little over sixty percent of what can sustainably be taken. On paper that sounds comfortable. It is not, because an average is a good way to hide the places where things are going wrong. Punjab extracts 156 percent of what its aquifers can safely give, Rajasthan 147 percent, Haryana 137. Of the 6,762 districts, blocks and similar units assessed, 730 are over-exploited. Satellites tell the same story from above. NASA’s GRACE mission, which weighs the earth’s water by measuring tiny changes in gravity, found northwest India losing about 17.7 cubic kilometres of groundwater a year in the mid-2000s while the rains stayed normal. The cause was pumping, not drought. A later study from IIT Gandhinagar estimated that northern India lost around 450 cubic kilometres between 2002 and 2021.

I want to be careful here, because this subject has suffered from exaggeration. Some of the most quoted warnings, such as the claim that a list of big cities would run out of groundwater by 2020, overshot their deadlines, and sceptics have used that to wave the whole problem away. The truth is less cinematic and more stubborn. The crisis is concentrated, it is deepening where it is worst, and the people least able to pay for it are the ones paying.

So why does a country keep emptying the thing it depends on? Not because farmers are careless. Every incentive points downward. After the Green Revolution the government began buying rice and wheat at assured prices, and in Punjab it ended up purchasing 92 percent of the state’s rice in 2019 and 2020. Free farm electricity followed a political promise in 1996, and within two years Punjab’s irrigated area had grown by 18 percent. Put those together and the cost of pumping one more litre falls to almost nothing for the farmer, while the cost of a sinking water table is spread across everyone else. The aquifer belongs to nobody, and about eighty percent of irrigation borewells are owned by individual farmers, each digging for himself. One IFPRI study attributes nearly two-thirds of the decline in Punjab’s water table over two decades to rice procurement alone. That is an estimate, not gospel, but the direction is not in doubt. A farmer in Ardana, Ram Diya Sharma, told a reporter he grows only paddy and wheat because those are the only crops the government reliably buys. He is not the villain of this story. He is behaving sensibly inside a system that rewards him for it. Maharashtra shows the same logic with a different crop: sugarcane covered under four percent of the state’s cropped area yet took almost seventy percent of its irrigation water, according to a government estimate for 2014-15.

Cities have their own version. Bengaluru grew faster than its pipes and filled in its lakes along the way. One study found that the number of water bodies in the area it examined fell from 159 to 93 between 1973 and 2007. In March 2024 the state’s deputy chief minister said that 6,900 of the city’s 13,900 borewells had gone dry. In Chennai in 2019, when the four reservoirs fell to about a tenth of one percent of capacity, a 9,000-litre tanker from the government cost 700 to 800 rupees, provided you could wait the fifteen to twenty-five days it took to arrive. A private tanker cost 4,000 to 5,000. Scarcity is a tax, and the poor pay it at the highest rate.

Climate change enters this story from both sides. The monsoon is turning into feast and famine. Widespread extreme rain events over central India tripled between 1950 and 2015, even as monsoon rainfall over north India fell by about 8.5 percent between 1951 and 2021 in one analysis. That matters because aquifers do not fill from cloudbursts. Hard rain runs off into drains and rivers. Water seeps down when rain falls gently over many days, as the IIT Gandhinagar researcher Vimal Mishra puts it. In 2009, a monsoon nearly a fifth drier than normal, followed by a winter about a degree warmer, cut groundwater storage in north India by around ten percent. His team’s projections suggest recharge could fall by 6 to 12 percent while irrigation demand rises by 6 to 20 percent. Less water going in, more coming out.

The loop closes in the other direction too. Pumping burns energy, and irrigating rice and wheat from groundwater alone releases about twenty million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The deeper the water, the more power every litre needs. Hotter summers ask for more irrigation. Each turn of the wheel makes the next one harder.

It reaches even the Ganga. Many of us learned at school that the river is fed by Himalayan snow. Through the plains, though, a large share of its dry-season flow is groundwater seeping back out of the earth. An IIT Kharagpur researcher puts the groundwater share at 52 to 58 percent at Varanasi. A 2025 study in PNAS, reconstructing the river’s flow over centuries, found that 1991 to 2020 was its worst dry spell in 1,300 years, and over-pumping is among the causes researchers discuss. When we drain the aquifer, we drain the river.

We have tried to fix this, and most of the fixes fell short in an instructive way. Haryana offers 8,000 rupees an acre to farmers who give up paddy. Officials could verify less than twenty percent of the one lakh acres they hoped for, and about 38 percent of the area farmers claimed turned out to be false or inaccurate, because assured paddy income beats a grant. Punjab’s push for direct seeded rice reached 3.41 lakh acres in 2026 against a target of five lakh. Subsidised drip irrigation was supposed to save water. A four-state study found that more than 65 percent of farmers who adopted micro-irrigation used the savings to expand their cultivated area, so the total pumped often did not fall. A 2018 review in the journal Science gave this a name, the paradox of irrigation efficiency. The common thread is that each fix leaves the underlying incentive alone, and the incentive wins.

And yet there are places where the water came back. In the early 1990s, Hiware Bazar in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district was a village from which about nine in ten residents had left to look for work. Then the villagers began to measure. They read rain gauges and observation wells every month and built a water budget: in a year with 200 millimetres of rain, grow one monsoon crop; at 300, add a second; at 400, there is enough for vegetables in summer. They banned deep borewells, sugarcane and cotton. Every October the gram sabha decides what will be planted. The water table, which once stood near 37 metres, rose to under 15. When severe drought struck in 2015, Hiware Bazar’s output held steady while neighbouring villages asked for tankers. In Alwar, Rajasthan, villagers say the Arvari river has flowed all year since 1995, after they built 238 johads and small dams. In Andhra Pradesh, a programme that taught farmers to track rainfall and water levels trained about seven thousand people, and its volunteers read more than two thousand observation wells. In over half the hydrological units studied, the groundwater balance improved within a year, though good rain helped. The pattern repeats: measurement, a shared rule, and people who live under the rule building the structures themselves.

So what should India do? I would make four moves, in order of how hard they are.

The first is to make electricity carry a signal. Gujarat’s Jyotigram scheme gave villages round-the-clock power and farm tubewells a fixed eight hours. Farm power use fell about 37 percent between 2001 and 2006 and the subsidy roughly halved. It also pushed up what tubewell owners charged for water by 30 to 50 percent, which hurt landless farmers, and a later study questioned how much pumping really fell, so it deserves copying with care. A better design lets farmers sell surplus solar power to the grid at a good price. Gujarat’s Suryashakti Kisan Yojana pays around seven rupees a unit for seven years. Then every litre a farmer pumps costs him income, which is exactly the signal he has never had. Early field results are mixed, so this should be tested aquifer by aquifer and paired with a guarantee that small and landless farmers can still buy water at regulated rates.

The second is to fix the market, not just the grant. In blocks where extraction runs far beyond recharge, the government should guarantee purchase of millets, pulses and maize at returns that match what paddy pays, and taper paddy procurement there on a published schedule. This will be costly and politically hard. But we are already paying. Punjab’s power utility lost an estimated 5.3 billion US dollars in income between 1996 and 2015 to free farm power. The choice is not between paying and not paying. It is between paying to deplete the aquifer and paying to protect it.

The third is to copy Hiware Bazar and make it ordinary. The Atal Bhujal Yojana has already put water security plans in thousands of gram panchayats, and the government has proposed making water budgeting mandatory everywhere. It should, with paid facilitators, because most villages do not have a sarpanch like Popatrao Pawar. Put farmer-read gauges in every panchayat and paint the village’s water level on the wall of the panchayat office, as plainly as a school paints its exam results. Cape Town more than halved its water use during its 2018 crisis, and one of its tools was a public map showing each household its own consumption. People respond to being seen.

The fourth is recharge and reuse, placed by science. Check dams and tanks helped Saurashtra recover after the late-1990s drought, but they work only alongside limits on use, otherwise the extra water is simply pumped out again. Aquifer maps should decide where to build them. In cities, the cheapest new source is wastewater. Israel reuses more than 85 percent of its sewage effluent. Surat treats only about a third of its wastewater, yet it has already earned around 140 crore rupees by selling treated water to industry. If construction and industry in every large city had to use treated water, groundwater could be kept for drinking.

Beneath all four sits a legal question. India’s model groundwater bills still lean on a colonial-era idea, from the Easements Act of 1882, that water belongs to whoever owns the land above it. That is how one farmer can legally drain an aquifer shared by a thousand neighbours. Legal scholars have argued for treating groundwater as a public trust, with control resting first with local bodies. States need laws that say so, and that give panchayats the power to enforce their own budgets.

I should be honest about what we do not know. Nobody has yet shown a fix that works across a whole state. The famous successes are small, close-knit villages with strong leaders. The government’s biggest programme reports large volumes of water saved, but most of those are modelled estimates, and independent proof of rising water tables is still thin. That is no reason to wait. It is a reason to build measurement into every step, so that we learn what works while there is still water to learn with.

Go back to Ardana. The fields are still green, and that is the dangerous part. A crisis you cannot see forces no one to act until the wells fail, and by then a borewell deep enough to find water can cost 15 to 16 lakh rupees. Groundwater is one of the few resources India can still manage before it runs out, because it is slow, local, and governed by choices a village can make. What remains to be decided is whether we will read the statement before the account is empty.

WriteToWin Monsoon 2026