When Wells Fail: Farmers’ Response to Groundwater Depletion in India

This post is part of the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog’s month-long series on Resilience.

Groundwater is the mainstay of irrigated agriculture in India. Hundreds of millions of smallholders depend on it for their livelihoods. These livelihoods, however, face serious threats from rapidly falling water tables in large parts of the country. What do farmers do when the wells run dry?

Pumping water from a tubewell in North Gujarat. Photo: Ram Fishman

In a recent study, Sheetal Shekhri compares villages in Uttar Pradesh that have access to groundwater at just below eight meters with villages where the groundwater level is just above eight meters.  The comparison is interesting because once the water table goes below eight meters, centrifugal pumps no longer work and farmers have to invest in submersible pumps—a much more expensive technology. The two sets of villages are otherwise quite similar to each other.

Sheetal finds that the incidence of poverty is significantly higher where groundwater irrigation requires more capital-intensive submersible pumps. Conflicts over water are also more frequent in these villages. Thus, falling groundwater tables can increase poverty even if water is not considered scarce, on average, such as in places like Uttar Pradesh.

The situation is more dire in water scarce regions of India, like in parts of the Mehsana district in North Gujarat. Here, aquifers are so depleted that digging deeper wells and installing more powerful pumps does not allow to access more water.  Often even deep wells have low and unreliable discharge, brackish water and a high rate of failure. While groundwater scarcity is found in large areas of India, pockets like Mehsana represent the more advanced stages of depletion.

How do farmers respond to such biting water scarcity?

What happens to agriculture and to the livelihoods of farmers in areas running out of groundwater? We surveyed farmers from a number of water scarce villages in Mehsana and Gandhinagar Districts of North Gujarat to answer these questions and compared them to farmers in other villages of the same region where water scarcity was not so severe. We selected severely water scarce villages after consulting with local well drillers and hydrogeological experts working with government agencies.

We found that in villages with more depleted aquifers, farmers' first response to groundwater scarcity is to intensify pumping by drilling deeper wells, installing more powerful pumps and using more electricity.

Given the advanced state of depletion, such approaches have limited success. A number of wells had to be abandoned and nearly half of all functional wells had low discharge. As a result, the volume of groundwater extracted has declined over last 10-15 years in spite of continued, large investments in chasing water. Irrigated cultivation has shrunk in these villages. Most farmers, including most well owners, now cultivate a smaller area of land in non-monsoon seasons. The area under cultivation has decreased by 7% and 17% during the winter and summer seasons, respectively, in water scarce villages.

We did not see any large-scale shift in cropping pattern to less water intensive crops. Adoption of water saving technologies like drip irrigation was also rare, though the government provides a generous capital subsidy for the purchase of drips and other micro-irrigation systems. Farmers show low interest in drip systems and other advanced irrigation technologies, in part,because they have poor incentives to save groundwater—an open access resource. Many farmers in the region are water buyers and they cannot afford the frequent watering of their crops that is needed with drip irrigation.

Flood irrigation in progress in a field in North Gujarat. Photo: Ram Fishman

 

 

 

Instead, farmers are migrating to cities and shifting their occupations away from farming. Young men are migrating to big cities at higher rates, while those staying behind in more water scarce villages shift to non-farm occupations. When we went to one such village for our survey, the village Sarpanch (the elected mayor of the village), Dayabhai Patel told us:

“Chhokrao baddha Ahmedabad chala gaya. Aapko koi nahin milega yahan. Kya karenge yahan? Paani-baani hai nahin.”

Young men have all moved to Ahmedabad now. You will not find anyone here. What will they do here? There is no water.

However, not everyone can migrate to cities. Not everyone has resources, skills, and the social network to support migration to cities. Moreover, responses to water scarcity are sharply defined along caste lines. The dominant land owning caste, the Patels, intensify pumping or send the young men in their families to work in the city.

Young men of marginal land owning and landless castes, in contrast, turn to rainfed farming, or abandon farming altogether but remain in the village and resort to commuting daily to nearby semi-urban or urban centres to work on construction sites or in cotton gins. Among Patels, adaptation seems effective: we find no differences in asset holdings of Patel households across villages with different levels of groundwater depletion. However, the landless households of more water scarce villages seem to fare worse, in terms of asset holdings, than their counterparts in less depleted villages.

When wells fail, agricultural production and the livelihoods of farmers suffer.  Irrigated agriculture is not very resilient to physical scarcity of groundwater, if there are no other surface sources. The amount of land under irrigation and agricultural outputs shrink in the face of scarcity, even when water saving options like less water intensive crops and micro-irrigation systems are available that could help farmers manage with less water.

Their relative lack of adoption in more depleted villages suggests that farmers face other constraints that need to be overcome. Key among these are a lack of collective action mechanisms for joint management of common aquifers. Relatively well-off farmers adapt to water scarcity by diversifying to non-agricultural and even non-rural occupations, but the poorer households do not have enough social and financial resources to support this occupational diversification. Therefore, water scarcity hurts them more than the well-off farmers.

Interestingly, many government policies meant to help farmers adapt to water scarcity, like power subsidies and promotion of drip irrigation, help relatively well-off farmers more than the poorer ones. This needs to change. The state government should implement policies and programs specially targeted to help poor farmers adapt to increasing water scarcity.