- The world is on the verge of a water crisis as people
fight over ever dwindling supplies, experts told the Stockholm Water Symposium.
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- A generation ago, Indian farmers in the state of Gujarat
used bullocks to lift water from shallow wells in leather buckets. Now
they haul it from 300 metres below ground using electric pumps. But that
technological revolution is about to have devastating consequences.
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- So much water is being drawn from underground reserves
that they, and the pumps they feed, are running dry, turning fields that
have been fecund for generations into desert.
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- The world's leading water scientists warned this week
that this little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia, and could
cause widespread famines in the decades to come.
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- Day and night
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- India is at the epicentre of the pump revolution. Using
technology adapted from the oil industry, smallholder farmers have drilled
21 million tube wells into the saturated strata beneath their fields.
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- Every year, farmers bring another million wells into
service, most of them outside the control of the state irrigation authorities.
The pumps, powered by heavily subsidised electricity, work day and night
to irrigate fields of thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa.
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- But this massive, unregulated expansion of pumps and
wells is threatening to suck India dry. "Nobody knows where the tube
wells are or who owns them. There is no way anyone can control what happens
to them," says Tushaar Shah, head of the International Water Management
Institute's groundwater station, based in Gujarat. "When the balloon
bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India," he says.
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- Shah gave his apocalyptic warning at the annual Stockholm
Water Symposium in Sweden last week. His research suggests that the pumps,
which transformed Indian farming, bring 200 cubic kilometres of water to
the surface each year. But only a fraction of that is replaced by the monsoon
rains.
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- China's breadbasket
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- The same revolution is being replicated across Asia,
with millions of tube wells pumping up precious underground water reserves
in water-stressed countries like Pakistan, Vietnam, and in northern China.
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- In China's breadbasket, the north China plain, 30 cubic
kilometres more water is being pumped to the surface each year by farmers
than is replaced by the rain. Groundwater is used to produce 40 per cent
of the country's grain, and Chinese officials warned this week that water
shortages will soon make the country dependent on grain imports.
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- Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the
past decade to one million, and water tables are plunging in the Pakistani
state of Punjab, which produces 90 per cent of the country's food.
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- In India, more farmers now provide their own water via
wells and pumps than rely on the government's irrigation system, which
is based on a network of canals. Corrupt management, low investment and
drying rivers have made the national system increasingly decrepit, and
it rarely delivers water to farmers when they need it.
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- In contrast, the $600 pumps are bringing short-term prosperity
to much of the country, turning India from a land of famine to a major
rice exporter in less than a generation.
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- Indian farmers have invested some $12 billion in the
new pumps, but they constantly have to drill deeper to keep pace with falling
water tables. Meanwhile, half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and
millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate
of suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching
epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to
pump water from depths of up to a kilometre.
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- Plunging water table
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- At least a quarter of India's farms are irrigated from
over-exploited reserves of water that threaten to run dry in the coming
decades, says Shah. Hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land
turn to desert. "In some areas accessible groundwater supplies could
be exhausted within the next five to 10 years."
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- It is already happening in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu, says Kuppannan Palanisami of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in
Coimbatore. A plunging water table means that only half as much land in
the state can be irrigated compared with a decade ago.
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- Large-scale farmers with powerful pumps and deep wells
still get good prices growing water-hungry crops like sugar cane and bananas,
but 95 per cent of the wells owned by small farmers have dried up, Palanisami
says. Some villages now stand empty.
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- Another crisis hotspot is northern Gujarat, where water
tables are dropping by 6 metres or more each year, according to Rajiv Gupta,
a state water official.
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- Is there a way out of the crisis? Some states are placing
thousands of small dams across river beds in a bid to replenish groundwater
by infiltration. And Hindu water priests are organising farmers to capture
the monsoon rains in ponds, in the hope that water will infiltrate and
recharge the aquifers.
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- The last Indian government proposed a massive $200 billion
River Interlinking Project designed to redistribute water around the country.
But the new government elected earlier this year has gone cool on the idea.
In any case, the water supplied would probably come too late.
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