On this day, at this hour, Ravi Satyanarayana’s life feels harmonious. He is a 55-year-old farmer in Yella Agraharam village in the West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh. He cultivates two acres of his own land and also five-and-a-half acres he has leased. For this crop, the paddy had already been harvested, sold off to the government. His money is paid.

 Sitting in the shade of a mango tree, looking at the light-yellowish expanse of mowed paddy fields, he looks content. People of this and surrounding areas, called uplands, do agriculture using borewells which burrow down about 250 to 300 feet to get water. No canal irrigation exists in this neck of the woods, as in the lower parts of the district. They grow paddy and cocoa, and manage palm oil plantations. The farmers run their motors from 9 to 5, more so for the second crop of the year between January and March. In the first crop between May and December, borewells and rains complement each other.

Satyanarayana says he or the farmers of this area never worry about water. They don’t worry about water not coming through their wells. He says in summer months the water level goes down and they lower their pipes; when the rains return, water comes up and they pull up their pipes accordingly. This area used to have many wells, from which water used to be pulled up using what he calls “belt motors”. Now, they just have motors and pipes, and the water gushes through 4-6 inch pipes. 

Some 50 km from here, in Jangareddygudem and Koyyalagudem areas of west Godavari district, water messes with people’s heads. Farmers fret about water being so far down they have to burrow further down; water in the patches of land exhausted and wells drying up; power cuts and delayed repairs and restoration taking days when water is urgently needed for their crops. Their water comes through one-and-a-half to two-inch pipes.

 “So long as water comes through the wells, there is no worry. Otherwise, we are finished,” says Satyanarayana. Groundwater levels change here within a few kilometres, and with it changes incomes, destiny, and lives.  

India’s groundwater is fast depleting. Unregulated usage through borewells puts the country’s irrigated farming, food supply and security at great risk. On top of it are the impacts of climate change and extreme weather.

India is facing a compounding set of crises: heavy water requirements for farming; aquifers on the edge; drought; unimaginative management of water; groundwater pollution, and drying of rivers to name a few. 

You know, the idea that how water flows in rivers, the belief that we can predict it and forecast it. This is very much relevant to people and society

Water has a way of seeping into the psyche. Whether it’s fisherfolks or scientists or plains people, water does that to you. Mountains too do that to you. In fact, water and mountains leave plains people to their devices, though their lives are intrinsically linked to the ocean and what it brings to them.  Without the monsoon winds slamming into the Himalayas, the plains would look different. But for the mountains, the winds would have flown off into China. 

It all started innocuously enough for Vimal Mishra, now the  Vikram Sarabhai Chair Professor at IIT-Gandhinagar. He specialises in climate change, drought, floods, hydrologic modeling and remote sensing. He is one of the team that developed a real-time drought monitoring tool for South Asia, along with Saran Adhar.

Back in 2004-05, when Mishra went to Germany to study, there was a big flood in East Germany. He launched himself into studying why the flood occurred and its impacts, the scale and reach. He learnt modeling. “You know, the idea that how water flows in rivers, the belief that we can predict it and forecast it. This is very much relevant to people and society,” said Mishra.

Later on, he went to Purdue University, Indiana, United States, and continued studying water and climate change; for his post-doctoral studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, he worked on operational hydrology that deals with forecasting water availability, floods and droughts. 

Since then, he has been continuously working on water and, around water, its extremes and its lack and its fill.

As a researcher, he often thinks in terms of the water cycle—the movement of water from atmosphere to land, to ocean, back to atmosphere—at a time when different kinds of extremes ravage people and land, from  drought to flood. 

“So, overall, if you look at our civilisation and India being an agriculture-based economy, water is of prime importance for a country like ours. Also, [India’s] geographic location is such that we need lots of water to grow our food,” said Mishra. 

India being in the extratropics, it has very high temperatures, lots of evaporation into the air and evapotranspiration (the sum of all processes through which water moves from land surface to atmosphere).

“Our food comes at the expense of a lot of water. And, that basically defines how and to what extent we are going to use water,” said Mishra.

The Indian monsoon is mostly for four months, June to September. Most of the rain falls during this period. But Indians do agriculture year round, even when there is no rain. Part of the monsoon rain is stored in reservoirs, which have limited capacity and are also used for drinking water. So, Indians, during the dry periods, October to May, pump groundwater like nobody’s business. India sucks about 230 billion cubic metres (BCM) of groundwater every year, almost 90 per cent for irrigation and the rest for industrial and residential use. India’s per capita water use is between 50 and 100 litres a day, which isn’t particularly high. 

Sucking groundwater has changed the entire landscape of our food production

However, dense irrigation happens in the Gangetic plains, UP, Bihar,  Haryana and Punjab. In south India and also in the northeast, Mishra sees different irrigation systems and cropping patterns, which don’t require  pumping that much groundwater.  According to the National Compilation on Dynamic Ground Water Resources of India, 2023, the annual groundwater extraction  is 241.34 bcm. The average stage of groundwater extraction for the country as a whole is 59.26 per cent.The report says  out of the total 6,553 assessment units (Blocks/ Mandals/ Talukas) in the country, 736 units in various states/ UTs (11.23 per cent) are over-exploited, meaning ground water extraction exceeding the annually replenishable ground water recharge. 

Enormous groundwater variability exists between north and south India. According to a 2022 study in Earth’s Future, the authors state that, “In fact, farmers in south India are more prone to climate variability on an interannual scale, relying on rainfall every year to replenish the thin hard rock aquifer. In turn, farmers in north India extract the currently reliable but not sustainable static groundwater stored in the thick alluvial aquifers. This difference necessitates distinctive groundwater management plans to ensure resilient agriculture, deemed the economic backbone of the country.”

According to Mishra, it has to do with the nature of aquifers. In the south, aquifers are in bedrock. As such they don’t have that capacity to keep providing water all the time. Constant pumping will make them go dry. That is why irrigation through canals and water tanks rules here. In the north, the aquifers are alluvial, which have more water storage and farmers keep  extracting it. Even here, some outliers exist. For example, Gujarat’s irrigation depends more on canals than on groundwater pumping. Taken as a whole, India is the world’s largest groundwater extractor. The country’s food security came at the cost of groundwater depletion.

“Sucking groundwater has changed the entire landscape of our food production,” Mishra said.

The country turned from food deficient to food sufficient, food scarcity to food surplus, food importer to food exporter. This resulted in groundwater depletion, especially in north India. Shallow aquifers litter the country in the north, in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, western UP, as well as a part of central UP.

“So we are at a stage where groundwater is becoming more and more crucial for our freshwater security and also food security. So let’s say, in future, if we have drought for consecutively two or three years because of monsoon failure, then our food production may go drastically down if there is no groundwater,” Mishra said.

In a study published in August 2024, in the journal Earth’s Future, Vimal Mishra and colleagues state that about 450 cubic kilometres of groundwater was lost in northern India during 2002-2021. The researchers said climate change will further add to the depletion in years to come. Mishra said this loss is equivalent to  37 times the quantity of water in India’s largest reservoir, the Indira Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, that holds 12.22 cubic kilometres.

Their paper especially draws attention to a scenario where a drying summer monsoon is followed by a warm winter.  For instance, the paper argues,  that  summer monsoon drying—10-15 per cent deficit for near-far periods—followed by substantial winter warming—(1-4C)—in future will further accelerate groundwater depletion by increasing–6-20 per cent—irrigation demands and reducing groundwater recharging by 6-12 per cent.

In an  October 2018 paper on groundwater depletion and the resultant CO2 emissions also in Earth’s Future, Mishra and colleagues state that the potential CO2 emissions due to bicarbonate extraction—CO2 release due to lowering of groundwater table—and groundwater pumping is approximately 32-130 million tonnes. 

In addition to the groundwater situation, India’s reservoir situation is not looking good. In the Central Water Commission’s weekly bulletin on the live storage status of 161 reservoirs as on April 24, 64.814 bcm of water is stored, which is more than 35 per cent of total storage capacity of 182 bcm. 

The situation, however, is likely to improve with IMD predicting a good monsoon.

“The core thing is the Indian monsoon. How will it change in the future? The second thing is how much and how widely we will misuse our groundwater. These two factors will decide how well our country will do in the future, especially under climate change,” said Mishra.

If the monsoon holds good in the future, the country can institute mechanisms to recharge groundwater, store surface water in reservoirs, and avert a crisis. But, if the monsoon fails consecutively for two or  three years then there will be a crisis. 

Mishra, however, doesn’t see the doomsday scenario happening. What he sees as more likely is water stress and scarcity through the year, in different places. Bangalore’s 2022 water scarcity was caused by groundwater depletion on top of drought, among other factors like increased demand. 

“I’m talking about the water crisis on a seasonal time scale where you have four months, three months, or part of the year, when water is not available for  irrigation or drinking. That is not imminent until a monsoon is okay, happy and healthy. This may not happen,” said Mishra.

India faces this particular problem of rivers drying up due to depletion of groundwater

Apart from monsoon, largely unnoticed and invisible changes are taking place, said Abhijit Mukherjee, a professor in the department of geology and geosciences at IIT-Kharagpur. He specialises in groundwater exploration for suitable and sustainable drinking water sources. The present estimate shows that about 11 cubic kilometres of groundwater is depleting every year. That is not coming back. 

As far as water is concerned, there are invisible problems galore. Vanishing groundwater itself is an invisible problem. Mukherjee said because of climate change there are impacts, “some of which we can foresee and some of which we cannot”.

Unseen things can impact or alter the hydrological cycle, the precipitation cycle, that can have cascading effects on surface water and groundwater systems. 

Mukherjee’s research shows that most of the rivers are drying out. That is because in the dry season, anywhere between 30 to 80 per cent of water flowing in the rivers is groundwater. Sometimes, it could be more. 

“That’s a very serious problem. India faces this particular problem of rivers drying up due to depletion of groundwater,” he said.

Mukherjee’s and his colleagues’ research points to arsenic and nickel and fluoride contaminating groundwater and drinking water. 

“These metals are invisible. They are tasteless. They don’t have any smell. So whatever you see, like, in the water, you only realise it after people get sick,” he said. In recent times, his team found nickel contamination in the Brahmaputra basin. More than 200 million people are exposed to arsenic toxicity in India and Bangladesh. 

“It is not detectable unless you have sophisticated instruments to detect,” said Mukerjee. 

The pollution could happen through natural processes, where water interacts with rocks and sediments which contain toxic elements. It could also happen through human sources of pollution and toxicity like pesticides, antibiotics, medical waste, and through industrial effluents and chemicals discharged into the ground. 

There is also the issue of using water in an inefficient way. 

“Having the right crops in the right place,” Mukherjee said.

The dry parts of the country like  Punjab and Haryana grow a lot of rice which is not the native crop for those places. People in West Bengal and Bihar grow wheat which is not exactly the right crop for that place. Both consume a lot of water. Adapting to the local hydro-climatic regimes is the key.

“You have to have scientifically-informed decision making,” Mukherjee said.

There is also the bigger planetary water movement across the globe that is causing hydrological regime shifts with a direct bearing on India’s water. A new paper, published on March 7, 2025, in the journal Science, states that between 2000 and 2002, a massive amount of water was depleted from global land areas, an unprecedented event. Terrestrial water loss was nearly twice as much as Greenland’s mass loss (270 gigatons of ice per year) during the same period.

“Our study provided two independent observational pieces of evidence for this depletion event: sea level change and polar motion,” professor Ki-Weon Seo told Fountain Ink. He is the lead author of the paper and professor, Earth Science Education, Seoul National University, South Korea.

“We expect,” Seo said, “that more water would evaporate into the atmosphere, making droughts a serious concern for the future.” That’s due to the atmosphere holding more moisture as air temperature rises, leading to increased evaporation. Also, groundwater pumped from aquifers eventually reaches the oceans through runoff and evaporation processes.

On how sea level rise and polar motion contribute to water loss of such magnitude, Seo said “water loss from land increases water volume in the oceans due to the conservation of water mass. As a result, we can observe sea level rise associated with land water depletion.”

Secondly, “polar motion is more complex to understand, but when water mass shifts from land to the oceans, the Earth’s rotational pole adjusts to conserve angular momentum.”

An earlier paper published in June 2023 in Geophysical Research Letters concluded that the Earth’s pole has drifted toward 64.16°E at a speed of 4.36 cm/yr during 1993–2010 due to groundwater depletion and resulting sea level rise. 

Given the hydrological regime shifts, professor Seo said, significant groundwater pumping in India will become an even more critical issue to consider. 

So how do you become better at predicting the future of how water in a place is going to be while being naive about human behaviour?

To avert really disastrous scenarios takes a lot of doing, though. Approaches to studying water and practices of conserving it need to be changed. An approach that is increasingly adopted is socio-hydrology. 

Veena Srinivasan, executive director of WELL Labs, works on socio-hydrology. Water, Environment, Land and Livelihoods (WELL) Labs work in the areas of land and water, building knowledge and innovation. 

Socio-hydrology is an approach where human behaviour and water cycles are not discrete entities. Human behaviour is a part of the water cycle. Socio-hydrology gives importance to both and seeks to understand their dynamics. 

Traditionally, Veena said, in most hydrological studies, assumptions on how humans behave are completely independent of the research. “So you have to account for those social behaviours, community behaviours when you’re designing the scheme itself, when you’re designing interventions. How do you become better at predicting the future of how water in a place is going to be while being naive about human behaviour? That is the core of the field approach. How do you anticipate how humans are going to change?” Veena said.

Not accounting for those behaviours leads to failures. When you institute drip irrigation, for example, the idea behind that is groundwater won’t be drawn in excess and the table would, in fact, rise because farmers will pump less water. However, that doesn’t happen. The farmer may think that since he saved water, he might as well irrigate more land rather than keeping it dry. 

“So the efficiency goes up for sure, but groundwater pumping doesn't go down. The same amount of groundwater is pumped,” Veena said. This is the well-known efficiency paradox. It is fine giving drip irrigation kits to encourage farmers to save on water, but “don’t expect groundwater levels to come up”.

There is also the recharge pumping paradox. For example, check dams increase water levels which encourage farmers to irrigate more land.  All these are well-documented social responses to water but technological models and schemes don’t account for them. 

According to Veena, the farmer is going to know what is going to benefit him  and act accordingly.  The design of the schemes is such that they are locked into growing crops like paddy. 

“Ours being a rice-eating culture, the consumers also are going to want it more. Which results in farmers pumping more and more water,” she said.

Veena said mitigating the situation involves incentives as well as penalties. Giving incentives for not drawing water has yielded results in Punjab.

“There needs to be a clear limit on how much groundwater can be pumped. No developed country in the world manages groundwater in a dry place without setting absolute limits on how much pumping is allowed,” she said.

According to Veena, in water matters, unless the behaviour of users of canals and dams is considered and incorporated into the intervention, the outcomes will not be favourable. 

“If you just design it in an engineering way and make assumptions about behaviour, you’ll get it wrong. What is really needed is an understanding of why people do the things they do. What will motivate them to do differently? What, whether incentives or capacities or knowledge, which is a gap, that is causing them to do.”

One problem she often comes across is lack of coordination. While the agriculture ministry incentivises increase in water use because they want to raise yields, the water resources ministry incentivises saving water. Unless the two of them talk to each other, there is not going to be any fix. It’s not just the government. Academics and NGOs, too, don’t talk to each other.  

There are lots of natural farming experiments, groundwater recharge experiments, watershed development, solar irrigation, which is all positive. 

“Historically, we’ve had many sectoral,  individual successes, even successes at scale, but not something working as an ecosystem,” Veena said.

It’s not all a losing cause, even against seemingly insurmountable problems. India has inherent strengths as far as water is concerned. Mishra said India is blessed with many rivers. Starting from the northeast, Brahmaputra, then UP—the Ganga being the major one—Sutlej, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Indus; coming down, Mahanadi, Brahmani, and then, Narmada, Kaveri, Tapi, Godavari and Krishna.

This is unlike China where the Yangtze river basin in the south of the country is home to four-fifths of China’s water, whereas China’s north contains almost half the population and two-thirds of farmland. The Yellow river is in the north. 

“Our country has the reverse. Rivers spread throughout the country, except Rajasthan and a part of western India. We are very much blessed,” said Mishra.

Mishra holds out the hope that “overall, if we can use, and, utilise rainwater efficiently, we can solve many of our water problems”.

“So, water sustainability is the key. Water sustainability will ensure our food security. If there is no water, we will not be able to grow food for so many people.”