Making farmers matter

And monitor, budget, manage—and prosper

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

OF ALL the activities that need water, far and away the thirstiest is farming. Cut the use of irrigation water by 10%, it is said, and you would save more than is lost in evaporation by all other consumers. Yet farming is crucial. Not only does it provide the food that all mankind requires, but it is also a great engine of economic growth for the three-quarters of the world’s poor who live in the countryside. Without water they may return to pastoralism—as some people already have in parts of the Sahel in Africa—or migrate, or starve. With water, they may fight their way out of poverty.

Surface water, though, is not enough to meet farmers’ needs. In the United States total withdrawals of water remained steady between 1985 and 2000 but groundwater withdrawals rose by 14%, mainly for agriculture, and in the period 1950-2000 they more than doubled. This was not all for the arid West. Midwestern Nebraska now ranks above California and Texas as America’s most irrigated state. Europe, too, increasingly relies on groundwater, as does the Middle East. In a network of pipes that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi has called the eighth wonder of the world, Libya is drawing fossil water that has lain undisturbed for centuries. Many hydrologists think it will be all but exhausted in 40 years.

It is India, though, that draws more groundwater than any other country. The 230 cubic kilometres that it pumps each year account for over a quarter of the world total. The tripling of Indian groundwater use since 1965 has been stimulated not just by growing demand for food but also by the lamentable public service provided by state governments and the relative cheapness and convenience of a private tubewell. By 2001 India had about 17m of these (and Pakistan 930,000 and Bangladesh 1.2m). The pumps for the wells are usually cheap to run because electricity is subsidised in most places, and in some it is free, though at times it is not provided at all; that is how water is rationed.

The proliferation has brought prosperity and an almost lush landscape to places like Punjab, which grows over half of India’s rice and wheat. But out of sight, underground, there is trouble. Water is being extracted faster than it is replaced and levels are falling, often by two or three times the officially reported rate, according to Upmanu Lall, of Columbia University. The World Bank says the groundwater in 75% of the blocks into which Punjab is divided is overdrawn. Over half the blocks of five other states—Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu—are judged to be in a critical or semi-critical condition, or are similarly over-exploited.

Up comes the poison

One consequence is that the water now being pumped is often salty and sometimes high in concentrations of naturally occurring poisons like arsenic, fluorides and uranium. In the village of Bhutal Kalan in Sangrur district, for instance, the farmers complain not just of water levels dropping by two metres after each of the two harvests a year but also of fluorosis, which may cause mottling of the teeth and skin, or, in its skeletal form, arthritic pain and bone deformities. Cancer is also rising, which the farmers blame on the natural poisons and on pesticides, which they apply specially heavily if they grow cotton.

The farmers’ woes do not end there. Though part of the Sangrur district suffers from a falling water table, the other part suffers from waterlogging. This is a common problem when poorly drained soil is over-irrigated, which results in plants’ roots being starved of oxygen, knocking perhaps 20% off a field’s productivity. Sometimes standing water will evaporate, leaving the soil salty as well as saturated.

Tushaar Shah, in “Taming the Anarchy”, his book on water in South Asia, says the groundwater irrigation boom in India is “silently reconfiguring” entire river basins. But of more immediate concern to the farmers are the economic and social consequences of overdrawing groundwater: falling yields, higher electricity costs, ever greater debts, even rising crime among the unemployed. Increasingly, say the farmers, they must look to other, part-time jobs, like driving a taxi. Or they must sell their land. Usually it will go to a village bigwig, perhaps with a little help from local officials.

The main winners, though, are the arhtiyas, the commission agents who act as middlemen between farmers and wholesale buyers and at the same time moonlight, sometimes extortionately, as moneylenders. Few farmers, big or small, are free of debt, and worries about interest payments have driven thousands of Indian farmers to suicide in recent years, many more than the official figures suggest, says Chander Parkash, an academic who helps to run a local NGO for farmers.

Back in Delhi, Himanshu Thakkar, of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, casts a more dispassionate eye over the Indian water scene. In Punjab he discerns a state hooked on irrigation. Reluctant to share its river waters with other states, it has passed laws to cancel earlier inter-state agreements. Its depletion of the aquifer also robs its neighbours in the Indus basin. Yet Punjab’s farmers benefit from (state or central) government spending on dams and canals; on help with inputs such as new seeds and fertilisers; on the security of a guaranteed support price for their produce; and on subsidies for electricity (which is in effect free). Lastly, in Punjab at least, the water pumped is not even metered, let alone paid for.

Down in the south-east, Andhra Pradesh also sees its groundwater disappearing. But unlike Punjab, whose alluvial aquifers in equilibrium are recharged by monsoonal rain and leakage from irrigation canals, Andhra Pradesh relies entirely on the monsoon for its groundwater replenishment. Moreover, since it sits on hard rock, only about 12% of the annual rainfall goes to recharge the aquifers, compared with perhaps 30% in Punjab, and subterranean water tends to run away into rivers after a month or two, so underground storage is limited.

Out in the arid west of the state, drought is almost the normal condition and, for the first time in India, a large number of farmers are starting to deal with it by reducing their demand rather than by pumping more and more from deeper and deeper. The idea behind a project that now involves nearly 1m people in 650 villages is to monitor, demystify and thus manage groundwater. The nine NGOs that run the scheme offer no subsidies, just knowledge.

At Mutyalapadu and round about, this comes from the Rev V. Paul Raja Rao’s Bharati Integrated Rural Development Society, which also runs a clinic, an orphanage and a microcredit organisation. One of the first water-management tasks for an organisation such as this is to map the locality and define its hydrological units, each of which is an area drained by a single stream with one inlet and one outlet. The region encompasses 11 hydrological units, one containing 41 villages. Some are much smaller.

The farmers taking part in the project measure and record rainfall, the water table, withdrawals and other data for their land. They calculate how much water will be available if the table is not to fall, decide which crops to grow and estimate how much water they will use, bearing in mind that about half will go in evapotranspiration. They then sit down together in a group—there are several of these for each hydrological unit—and draw up a water budget. Details of the eventual agreement, showing who should grow what and how, are displayed on a wall in the village and updated over the year with information about rain, harvests and even revenues.

No one is compelled to take part; the enterprise is voluntary and collaborative. But so far most farmers, and their families, seem pleased. The local diet has become more varied, since 13 crops are now grown in the area, compared with eight in the past. Those that need most water— bananas, rice and cotton—have yielded to others that need less, such as peanuts and a locally bred variety of green lentils. Chemical fertilisers have been replaced by compost, a change welcomed for both health and financial reasons. Mulch, manure and organic weedkillers are also used. The upshot is that although incomes have not risen—most of the crop is eaten, not sold for cash—the cost of inputs has fallen and those involved feel they are engaged in a sustainable activity.

That is because the scheme puts the people who invest the money, grow the crops and live or die by their efforts in charge of their most crucial resource; they are all barefoot hydrogeologists. The relentless drilling of wells has abated: in two units near Mutyalapadu no new wells were bored over two recent seasons, and in the wider region only eight out of 58 units showed no reduction in pumping. Overdrawing is judged to be under control, partly because everyone knows what is happening. And the idea is catching on. The entire water department of Andhra Pradesh has been trained in the basic principles; Maharashtra has three similar projects under way; and Gujarat, Orissa and Tamil Nadu are keen to follow suit.