South Asia accounts for 50% of the groundwater pumped for irrigation globally. The practice has been critical to ensuring food security in the region, enabling farmers – predominantly smallholders – to increase food production. And yet the scale of use has caused levels of groundwater to fall worryingly quickly.
Several South Asian states and provinces have put in place measures to make groundwater accessible to farmers, creating new problems. As well as groundwater depletion, there have been financial losses for governments that provide subsidised power for electric pumps.
For policymakers and farmers alike, the challenge lies in addressing these problems without impacting livelihoods or compromising food security. Practical solutions exist, as we will see, but they only work when they are tailored to regional needs and involve collaboration between policymakers, farmers and researchers.
Extracting groundwater
Smallholders – with less than two hectares of land – produce the bulk of food in South Asia. They tend to be poor and often women. In Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal, the majority of workers in agriculture are women.
Smallholders are often reliant on groundwater, which they access through tubewells, to grow crops. Majority of tubewells are installed privately by the smallholders, with an estimated 30 million in the region. Poorer smallholders who are unable to afford their own tubewells buy water from those who have them.
The price of groundwater is derived from the energy sources used to extract it. Tubewells are fitted with pumps, which require energy such as diesel, electricity or solar.
Diesel pumps power the majority of tubewells in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh (74-90%), while in India, electric pumps power around 76% of tubewells.
With diesel pumps, farmers often pay for fuel out of pocket. Electric pumps are cheaper to operate thanks to power subsidies for irrigation, which are widespread across the region. Governments supply electricity for irrigation either free of charge or below market rates.
Subsidies: a double-edged sword
Subsidised electricity has contributed to food security by supporting farmer livelihoods, increasing food production and stabilising food prices. However, it has also contributed to electric utilities’ financial insolvency, and, perhaps more alarmingly, to wasteful irrigation and the depletion of aquifers, with depth to water falling by around 1.5 cm per year in north India between 2002 and 2021.
When tubewell owners pay electricity tariffs far below supply costs, governments shoulder the financial losses. A tubewell owner is also less likely to use water or electricity efficiently when they barely cost anything.
Solving these problems, however, is not simply about increasing energy prices. Apart from being politically unpopular, price increases would be challenging to implement as they would require metering electric tubewells, most of which are unmetered. Additionally, getting millions of farmers to accept being metered is no small feat.
More importantly, increasing electricity prices may harm farmers’ livelihoods and increase the price of food production. And because large-scale data on the sale and purchase of groundwater is not usually collected, implementing pricing reforms will be complicated.
Consequently, policymakers are experimenting with alternative approaches.
Water-efficient technology
Among these is to increase the use of technologies that can potentially reduce wasteful irrigation.
One of these is direct seeded rice (DSR). With this method, farmers plant rice seeds directly in a moistened field instead of the traditional approach of germinating seedlings in a nursery and transplanting them. DSR eliminates the need for the constant field-flooding required by the transplantation process.
Another is alternate wetting and drying (AWD), in which farmers only periodically drain and re-flood rice fields. They install a perforated plastic pipe in the rice field to monitor water levels, and only flood the field when water in the pipe falls to about 15 cm below the surface of the soil.
Despite relatively low costs and efforts by regional governments to increase uptake of these technologies, adoption remains low. Farmers are sometimes put off by unintended effects of these methods. DSR and AWD, for example, both increase weeds in fields, reducing net profits.
The rewards and risks of solar pumping
Another approach, increasing in popularity, is powering the pumps with sunlight. In recent years, governments in South Asia have been subsidising solar-pump-and-panel kits.
In India alone, more than 500,000 small solar pumps had been installed as of 2023, from less than 4,000 in 2012.
Subsidising equipment is attractive for governments because it is one-time, unlike a recurring power subsidy. And farmer demand for solar pumps is high because of the lack of running costs. Empirical assessments from Nepal, as well as the Indian states of Rajasthan and Bihar, show that solar pumps increase the amount of irrigated areas and food production, because access to affordable water improves; this produces significant improvements in farmer incomes and livelihoods.
However, the assessments also confirm that the costless pumping will almost certainly encourage more pumping.
The potential of cash incentives
Another approach involves setting an entitlement of electricity units on tubewells for each well owner, without increasing prices, and offering to purchase unused electricity units at a rebate price. This strategy is being piloted by utilities in several Indian states.
The rebate price is set lower than what it costs the utility to supply energy, and higher than what farmers pay when they use electricity to pump groundwater. This incentivises the tubewell owner to avoid pumping unless it improves yield, because they can earn some money from selling unused electricity units.
Emerging evidence from pilot studies of such cash incentives in Punjab and Gujarat suggests mixed results in reductions of wasteful use of water and electricity. A 2022 paper I co-authored shows that in Punjab, when rice farmers were provided with uninterrupted daytime electricity, cash incentives can lead them to reduce power consumption by at least 7.5%, and irrigation hours by up to 30%, without impacting yields. A 2016 study from Gujarat, meanwhile, shows no evidence of cash incentives impacting water use.
The pilot programmes also reveal difficulties in setting the entitlements. This is challenging because most tubewells are unmetered, shrouding in mystery the history of usage at individual tubewells. Setting entitlements too low would punish farmers. Too high would defeat the purpose of the approach.
Managing expectations and navigating trade-offs
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. A practical approach may therefore be to acknowledge the trade-offs involved in the various strategies, between rescuing utilities, improving irrigation efficiency, reducing pressure on groundwater and supporting farmer livelihoods. Doing so may help policymakers choose a location-appropriate strategy.
For example, a 2023 paper on an experiment introducing AWD to 2,000 farmers in Bangladesh, found the technology led to conservation of water in areas where farmers paid modest payments for pumping. Deploying solar pumps in eastern parts of South Asia, where irrigation is underdeveloped and poverty is deep, has improved farmers’ access to water and thus crop yields.
Activating sensors where present on new solar and electric pumps can improve measurement and monitoring of how much groundwater is pumped out. In addition, introducing tailored questions on irrigation in agricultural census and sample questionnaires can generate data on use, including the buying and selling of groundwater.
In South Asia, where farmers continue to be poor, and where climate change is likely to exacerbate groundwater depletion, researchers should highlight the effects of potential policy approaches on smallholders in order to nudge policymakers towards contextually appropriate solutions.
Collaborations between policymakers, farmers and researchers can produce actionable knowledge and identify practical solutions. Policymakers can benefit from the lessons that theory and empirical evidence have to offer. Researchers can learn from the challenges that implementers face to better target their endeavours.
Ultimately, however, to manage complex trade-offs and to make discernible progress in managing groundwater resources for livelihoods, centering farmers’ needs is vital. After all, it is through such co-creation that the Green Revolution came about.
