Water and the Budget

Recharging groundwater in 100 stressed districts will free up land and water constraints. The farmer now wants supplies during water-stress periods to boost yields

There are a number of very sensible things in the budget. The programme of recharging groundwater in a hundred stressed districts would relieve the land and water constraint if implemented properly and we have elsewhere, in work for rainfed regions, given a roadmap for this. There are basic factors at play. As compared to relief against rainfall failure, the farmer now wants yield enhancing water supplies for water stress periods of diverse crops grown with modern technology.

Access to groundwater gives them this facility; badly planned and inefficiently managed canals don8217;t. Farmers and their communities now want control on water deliveries. The crisis in the AIBP, with thousands of crores spent, but canal irrigation actually falling shows this and we wish the policy makers had reflected on these factors. There are difficulties in expanding irrigation, which are at a qualitative level. A Planning Commission Working Group working with me has listed the large number of districts where in terms of groundwater use, the coefficient of variability is high and per cent of villages with deeper water table is high. The states covered under this category include Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

The list of 100 districts where the problem of excessive groundwater use has led to major economic and sustainability problems is available. These districts are largely in the rainfed regions and account for over 60 per cent of India8217;s 8216;critical8217; and over-exploited blocks. These also happen to have the highest concentration of dug-wells in the country; here is where falling water tables have the most disastrous impact on drying up wells and forcing farmers to revert to rainfed farming. Outside Punjab, most recent farmer suicides are reported from these districts; and groundwater stress is an important source of agrarian distress in these regions.

Tushar Shah is the champion of the view that his distress can be alleviated 8212; and at a relatively low cost to the society8212;iquest; by mounting a well-designed programme of groundwater recharge. It is sometimes suggested that small watershed development programmes are an effective answer to groundwater depletion; however, this is only partly so. In arid and semi-arid areas of India, tanks, small water harvesting structures with poor surface-area-to-depth ratio act as evaporation pans; they lose much more water to non-beneficial evaporation than is available for recharging the aquifers. In the old times, when groundwater withdrawal was a small fraction of today, irrigation tanks made sense; but today, they need to be reinvented. This is evident in the fact that on their own, farmer communities in many of these districts are converting centuries-old irrigation tanks into percolation tanks to increase recharge to their wells.

Once the National Authority for Rainfed Regions starts functioning, an Agency Approach could be designed to support and direct the watershed projects at the local level in the framework of Activity Mapping as worked out for example by Panchayati Raj ministry for stakeholder participation and public/private partnerships. This would set up lean mechanisms at the state and national levels to ensure outcomes. We can8217;t let the excellent initiatives in the budget fail.