Punjab Draws 152% of Its Extractable Groundwater, and Falling Water Tables Shift Wealth to Large Farmers

The news

Punjab. An editorial in The Hindu on Wednesday, titled ‘Water wealth’, argues that groundwater exploitation in Punjab now disincentivises small farmers and widens the wealth gap among cultivators. According to the 2025-26 Dynamic Groundwater Assessment, Punjab’s groundwater extraction rate was 152%, meaning the State draws about one and a half times the groundwater that can be extracted each year without drawing down its reserves. Interventions have reduced the number of ‘over-exploited’ blocks by five over the last two assessments, but 72% of Punjab’s 153 blocks remain in the ‘red zone’, the highest share among States. The principal consumer is irrigation for rice and wheat, amounting to nearly 25 billion cubic metres a year in the latest estimate. The fraction of observation wells with water below 40 metres in the post-monsoon period grew by two percentage points between 2022 and 2025. The editorial traces the problem to policy: a food-security strategy produced a concentrated rice-wheat system in which assured procurement, subsidised electricity and groundwater access made intensive cultivation less risky than alternatives, while uncertainty over storage, prices, processing and supply chains for other crops went unaddressed. The new point is distributional. A recent study in the Economic and Political Weekly found that farmers with marginal holdings use water more efficiently, but wealthier farmers can reach lower water tables and draw larger volumes. As the water table drops, those who cannot afford deeper tube-wells are forced to buy water, transferring wealth to larger landowners and creating unregulated dependencies. A separate study by two members of the same team, published in Discover Sustainability, found that in Sangrur and Barnala larger farms earned higher returns but recorded lower groundwater productivity for paddy than smaller farms. Groundwater productivity means crop output per unit of groundwater used. Depletion thus raises the capital needed for irrigation, privileging farmers with better access to finance. The editorial notes that the ‘Pani Bachao, Paisa Kamao’ (save water, earn money) scheme, which pays farmers cash for every unused kilowatt-hour of pumping power below a threshold, is promising but has low enrolment. It proposes that Punjab use part of its electricity subsidy bill to support smallholders directly, help collectivise irrigation infrastructure and support a transition to other crops, so that benefits follow the cultivator, including tenants, rather than the owners of land or pumps. The syllabus link is GS3 on irrigation, cropping patterns, farm subsidies and resource conservation.

Static syllabus linkage

1. Groundwater assessments classify blocks by the share of recharge that is pumped out. India’s Dynamic Ground Water Resources Assessment is conducted jointly by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) and State groundwater departments using the methodology of the Ground Water Estimation Committee, 2015. The key measure is the stage of groundwater extraction: annual extraction divided by the annual extractable groundwater resource, expressed as a percentage. An assessment unit, usually a block, is ‘safe’ at up to 70%, ‘semi-critical’ above 70% and up to 90%, ‘critical’ above 90% and up to 100%, and ‘over-exploited’ above 100%; units with saline groundwater are classed separately. A figure of 152% for a whole State means extraction is being sustained by mining stored water that will not return on any human timescale.
2. The law still treats groundwater as an attachment to land. Water, including irrigation, is a State subject under Entry 17 of the State List, subject to Entry 56 of the Union List on inter-State rivers. Under common law principles reflected in the Indian Easements Act, 1882, the owner of land has the right to draw groundwater beneath it, which means that whoever can drill deeper and pump harder effectively owns more of a shared aquifer. The Central Ground Water Authority, constituted under Section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, regulates extraction mainly by industry and infrastructure, not farm pumping. Model groundwater Bills circulated by the Centre have proposed treating groundwater as a common resource held in public trust, an idea the Supreme Court applied to natural resources in M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997).
3. Punjab’s rice-wheat lock-in was built by policy, not by nature. Paddy is not a traditional crop of semi-arid Punjab; its spread followed the Green Revolution, assured procurement of wheat and paddy at the minimum support price by the Food Corporation of India and State agencies, and free electricity for farm pumps introduced in the late 1990s. The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 prohibits sowing paddy nurseries and transplanting paddy before notified dates, so that transplanting coincides with the monsoon and evaporation losses fall. The side effect is a later harvest and a shorter window before wheat sowing, which is one reason farmers burn paddy stubble in October and November. Expert groups, including the committees headed by S.S. Johl, have repeatedly recommended diversifying part of the paddy area to other crops.
4. The Centre’s groundwater and irrigation schemes target demand as well as supply. The Atal Bhujal Yojana, a World Bank-assisted Central Sector Scheme launched in December 2019, promotes community-led groundwater management in water-stressed areas of seven States: Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh; Punjab is not among them. The ‘Per Drop More Crop’ component of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (2015) subsidises micro-irrigation such as drip and sprinklers. PM-KUSUM (2019) supports solar pumps and the solarisation of agricultural feeders, which can cut the fiscal cost of farm power but, if pumping becomes free at the margin, can also raise extraction. Crop diversification programmes under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana target the original Green Revolution States.

Why UPSC loves this

1. GS3 names every link in this chain. The GS3 syllabus lists major cropping patterns, irrigation systems, and direct and indirect farm subsidies and minimum support prices. Mains questions have repeatedly asked about the sustainability of the rice-wheat system, crop diversification in north-west India, and the link between subsidies and resource depletion. The editorial adds the equity dimension that most answers miss: depletion is not only an environmental problem but a regressive one.
2. Prelims asks for categories, institutions and legal bases. Questions on groundwater have tested the CGWB and CGWA, the categories used in assessments, and schemes such as Atal Bhujal Yojana and its coverage. Knowing the thresholds (70%, 90%, 100%) and the legal basis of the CGWA under the Environment (Protection) Act makes such questions straightforward.
3. Essay and GS4 draw on the commons. The ‘tragedy of the commons’, where individually rational pumping destroys a shared resource, is a staple for essays on sustainability and for ethics case studies on inter-generational equity. Punjab is the clearest Indian example, and the editorial’s point about wealth transfer gives it a justice angle.

Analysis

1. Groundwater depletion works like a regressive tax. When the water table falls, the cost of irrigation rises for everyone, but it rises as a lump: a deeper bore and a bigger submersible pump. A large farmer can spread that cost over many acres and borrow cheaply; a marginal farmer cannot, and so becomes a buyer of water from the neighbour who could. The editorial’s evidence that small farmers use water more efficiently makes the outcome perverse: the more efficient user is pushed out and pays rent to the less efficient one. This is why the problem cannot be left to ‘market adjustment’; the market here rewards access to capital, not efficiency.
2. Free power is the subsidy that most rewards the biggest pumper. An unmetered, free electricity supply means the benefit each farmer receives is proportional to the horsepower of his pump and the hours he runs it, which in turn tracks landholding and wealth. A tenant or a farmer without a tube-well receives nothing directly. ‘Pani Bachao, Paisa Kamao’ is the right idea because it keeps the entitlement but pays farmers to leave it unused, turning saved water into income. Its low enrolment, however, suggests farmers fear it is a first step towards ending free power, so its success depends on trust and on a credible guarantee that the base entitlement will not be cut. The counter-view is that free power is a political settlement so entrenched that only voluntary, compensated schemes can move it.
3. Efficiency alone will not save the aquifer while paddy remains the safest crop. The editorial notes that the scale of demand continues to overwhelm gains in efficiency. Drip irrigation and better pumps lower water use per hectare, but if the saved water is used to expand or intensify paddy, total extraction does not fall; economists call this a rebound effect. The binding constraint is that assured procurement at MSP makes paddy far less risky than maize, pulses or cotton, which lack comparable storage, processing and price assurance. Unless the alternative crop is as safe to grow as paddy, diversification schemes will continue to under-deliver, as they have for decades.
4. The nation’s food security was bought with Punjab’s water, and the nation should share the bill. Punjab’s rice goes largely into the central pool, which means the State has in effect exported its groundwater embedded in grain to the rest of India. Asking Punjab alone to bear the cost of transition, lower incomes, stranded tube-well investments and political backlash, is neither fair nor likely to work. A credible transition would include central support per hectare shifted out of paddy, procurement or price support for alternative crops, and investment in processing for those crops. The counter-argument is that Punjab’s own power subsidy is a State choice the Centre should not underwrite; the answer is to tie central support to State reform of that subsidy.
5. Benefits must follow the cultivator, which runs into the same record problem as women farmers. The editorial’s best line is that welfare should subsidise access to water rather than groundwater extraction, and should reach tenants as well as owners. But tenancy in Punjab is largely oral and unrecorded, so a tenant has no document to claim a benefit, exactly as a woman farmer lacks a title in Maharashtra. Collective irrigation, such as shared tube-wells owned by water users’ groups, would give small farmers access without each needing a deep bore. Any redesign must therefore begin with a way to identify the actual cultivator, or the subsidy will again flow to the name on the land record.

Administrator's brainstorm