Shallow Aquifers

In recent years, there has been a notable trend towards overdependence on groundwater for irrigation in the Chikkaballapur district of Karnataka and the Annamayya district of Andhra Pradesh. The transformation in the region has been marked by a growing number of cases where farmers are drilling borewells as a response to the declining water table over the years.

As Amol Singh Yadav, a folk artist hailing from Dasania village in the Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh, stood up to sing his song about the Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY), one could imagine how ambitious and potentially transformative the ABY scheme is for the management of groundwater at the community level.

Population increase has placed ever-increasing demands on the available groundwater resources, particularly for intensive agricultural activities.

In the Bundelkhand craton region, groundwater is the primary source of drinking water. Due to low rainfall, agriculture mainly depends on the goundwater supply, which comes through bore wells. Most of the time, the region faces a water crisis during the summer season as the wells and tube wells go dry.

Groundwater, the lifeline of India

Over 55 percent of India’s population relies on groundwater for irrigation, water for cattle, domestic consumption, and industrial use making India the world’s greatest groundwater extractor, surpassing the USA and China combined.

Starting May 15, 2022 Mamatha from Andhra Pradesh, and Rameshwar from Maharashtra, equipped with a mobile phone and a measuring tape, will be joining several others heading to their fields and neighbouring villages to measure wells.

India is the largest user of groundwater in the world. Agriculture, rural and urban domestic water supply and increasingly industries are shaping the dependency on groundwater.

Why de-commission defunct or failed bore wells?

According to a 2006 report by the Inter-Agency Task Force, titled ‘Gender, Water and Sanitation’, women’s participation in water governance projects is important for their success. Given the gendered division of labour in our society, it is not hard to see why.

In Kerala, around half the urban population and 80% of the rural population depend on open wells on their domestic water needs. But in the last decade, the majority of observatory wells recorded an average annual decline of half a meter.