India, Groundwater Governance case study
Table 11: Qualitative assessment of groundwater recharge enhancement schemes PROS
CONS
Some increase in agricultural production
Distracting attention from more pressing need for irrigation demand management and increasing
and increased security for planting higher-value
productivity of scarce groundwater gives impression
dry season crops
that a simple single solution to groundwater resource
Some village groundwater sources improved in
problems exists
quality and/or dry-season yield
through reactivation of disused irrigation wells
River basin approach and upstream-downstream
Stimulus for formation of village-level water
impacts (on streamflow and irrigation tank filling) often
resource associations / committees
ignored and never costed into scheme pre-appraisal
Promotes dialogue between local government,
Successful short-term local recharge enhancement
social NGOs, village authorities, and
often just leads to more active irrigation wells, with
community on water resource issues
groundwater resource imbalance, competition, and sustainability problems continuing
Provision of work and mobilization of rural landless laborers in construction
Not necessarily (or usually) focused on rural poverty alleviation (apart from creation of short-term employment in construction)
May lead to corruption practices and ineffective use of water
Source: Foster and Garduño 2009
4.5.2
Management issues
A major part of Punjab’s agricultural success has been based upon the use of groundwater for irrigation. The number of operating tubewells has increased from 500,000 in the 1970s to 2.3 million in 2008. Some 70 percent of the area now under irrigated cultivation is dependent on groundwater, since the surface-water canals can only meet a minor proportion of current agricultural demand. The consequences of this massive and uncontrolled development of groundwater is that the water table has been in continuous decline, with depletion rates currently in the range 0.6–1.0 m/year (equivalent to a net overall rate of intensive abstraction in the range 120–180 mm/year), except in the downgradient saline groundwater zones. While storage depletion is in itself not critical (being partly an inevitable significant consequence of groundwater development), it is resulting in mounting cumulative costs for (a) the state government, which underwrites most of the cost of rural electrical energy; and (b) farmers, who are being confronted with the need to move from low-cost water wells to deeper tubewells with electric submersible pumps, resulting in adverse impacts on those farming the least land.
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