India's water crisis

When the rains fail

Sep 10th 2009 | VEERALAPALAM, ANDHRA PRADESH, AND LUBANA TEKU, PUNJAB
From The Economist print edition

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The village of Veeralapalam offers a snapshot of this, and of the losers in a political economy where water is the main currency. From the early 1960s it received occasional water in a small canal, at the tail-end of a system off the Krishna river. But this has been dry since 1985 because of leakage up-channel and, the Lambadi farmers say, illegal tapping by members of a more favoured community. The canal was re-dug last year under the NREGS, but seems unlikely to get any water.

A few miles up-channel in Ulisaipalam, a village dominated by high-caste Hindus, there is water, but more problems. Wading shin-deep, P. Venkat Reddy transplants dark green paddy into his two acres of irrigated, but undrained, land. When there is water in the canal, for around four months each year, it is waterlogged, fit only for paddy. But in recent years the canal has held insufficient water for a full paddy crop—forcing Mr Reddy to supplement it with groundwater. He pumps this, with electricity given free to farmers in AP, from a borehole drilled 45 metres into his land.

Since the 1970s, when affordable water pumps became available and electricity reached many more places, millions have done the same. India is the world’s biggest user of groundwater, with some 20m bore-holes providing water for over 60% of its irrigated area. Being entirely in farmers’ hands, this is up to three times more productive than canal irrigation. In 2002, by a conservative estimate, it was worth $8 billion a year to the Indian economy—more than four times what the central and state governments spend on irrigation schemes.

Groundwater irrigation has transformed the lives of millions. It has also rectified problems, of water-logging and salination, caused by canals. But in many places, including productive Punjab and Haryana, whose rather well-off farmers also get free or cut-price electricity, the rate of groundwater extraction is unsustainable. Nearly a third of India’s groundwater blocks were defined in 2004 as “critical, semi-critical or over-exploited”. The World Bank reckons that 15% of India’s food is produced by “mining”—or unrenewable extraction of—groundwater, including in 18 of Punjab’s 20 districts. Satellite maps released by America’s NASA last month showed that north-western India’s aquifers had fallen by a foot a year between 2002 and 2008: a loss of 109 cubic km (26 cubic miles) of water, or three times the volume of America’s biggest man-made reservoir.

This is storing up trouble. As bore-holes run dry, as those over the hardrock aquifers of southern-central India do on a monthly basis, many poor people may be deprived of safe drinking water. Currently, 220m Indians lack this. Not all India’s groundwater is potable anyway; in places, it is getting seriously polluted. And India’s groundwater reserves will be especially missed when climate change makes surface-water sources even more sporadic. Their depletion will accentuate this, with springs, which could have provided a trickle of run-off during the extended dry seasons, increasingly failing.

Объем производства и государственных закупок хлопка-сырца в Узбекистане к 2020 году будет поэтапно сокращен с 3,35 миллиона в 2015 году до 3 миллионов тонн. <...>

За счет сокращения производства хлопка-сырца на 350 тысяч тонн будет высвобождено порядка 170,5 тысячи гектаров поливных земель. Как правило, это земли с низким бонитетом, где урожайность хлопчатника не превышает 12-15 центнеров с гектара при средней урожайности в стране 26,1 центнера с гектара. Высвобождаются в основном засоленные земли, а также земли в предгорных зонах, непригодных для возделывания хлопчатника.

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На посевных площадях, освобождаемых из-под хлопчатника, в первую очередь будут высеваться овощные культуры, в том числе картофель, кормовые, масленичные культуры, создаваться сады и виноградники.

В результате оптимизации посевных площадей и внедрения современных агротехнологий к 2020 году предусматривается довести объемы производства зерновых колосовых культур до 8,5 миллиона тонн с ростом на 16,4%, увеличить объем производства картофеля на 35%, других овощей — на 30%, плодов и винограда — на 21,5%, мяса — на 26,2%, молока — на 47,3%, яиц — на 74,5%, рыбы — в 2,5 раза.