https://undark.org/2025/02/03/downstream-india-green-revolution/
"India extracts more groundwater than any other country worldwide, even more
than the U.S. and China combined. In 2024, the country drew nearly 65 trillion
gallons of water from its aquifers. A major driver of this demand is
agriculture, especially in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana.
The origins of this thirst can be traced back to the Green Revolution of the
1960s. Battling persistent food shortages and dependence on grain imports,
Indian planners hoped to attain self-sufficiency in food production. They
provided farmers with high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, and
pesticides, and also helped mechanize farming tools and equipment.
In Punjab, one of the program’s focus areas, farmers were encouraged to move
away from their traditional crops such as pulses, maize, and oilseeds to rice
and wheat. As a result, the area under wheat cultivation more than doubled
between 1960 and 2023, with production rising more than nine-fold. Rice
cultivation saw even steeper increases, with land use increasing nearly 14-fold
and an astonishing 58 times more production of the grain.
Rice requires a lot of water — between around 350 and 600 gallons for every
pound of grain produced. Farmers initially relied on canals for water, but they
soon began drilling tube wells — pipes bored deep underground — to tap into
aquifers. The number of tube wells in Punjab increased from 200,000 in 1970 to
more than 1.5 million today, said Samanpreet Kaur, a groundwater expert at the
Punjab Agricultural University. Eighty-six percent of Punjab’s available water
resources are now being used for agriculture and 75 percent for paddy, or rice
plants, alone.
According to a report from the Central Ground Water Board, a governmental
scientific body, water levels in Punjab are dropping at an average of almost 20
inches per year. The tube wells used to be located at 100 to 150 feet. “Now
they have reached up to 400 to 500 feet,” said Sunil Mittal, a soil and
groundwater expert at the Central University of Punjab. He explained farmers
are now hitting aquifers surrounded by minerals such as uranium, lead, and
arsenic, which are entering the water used for both agriculture and household
consumption. These heavy metals, along with nitrates in fertilizer runoff, may
have contributed to increasing rates of cancers.
Mittal warned that restoring the quality of groundwater will be a difficult
task — one that has no strategy in place yet. The contamination has happened
over 50 years and it will take just as long to clean it up, he said. “I don’t
think any artificial clean up technology will work at such a large level.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-plant-vaccines/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
