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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Agricultural reforms and urban accountability key to water management -Joydeep Gupta

Agricultural reforms and urban accountability key to water management -Joydeep Gupta

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published Published on Jun 30, 2019   modified Modified on Jun 30, 2019
-TheThirdPole.net

Between wasteful flood irrigation, free electricity to farmers, and skewed market incentives, agriculture is a mess; while lack of accountability creates urban water problems in South Asia

The 2019 South Asian summer monsoon is late, slow and inadequate so far. If it makes up somewhat for lost time, those 55% of Indian farmers who do not get irrigation water will still suffer, but there is a chance that reservoirs may fill to the point where people can draw water until January or even February next year.

And then what will people do till next June? For 12 years out of the last 19, water scarcity has been a crisis so common in South Asia before the monsoon arrives, that it is becoming the new normal. The pictures of people again queueing for hours at the few taps in urban slums, or farmers again placing their water jars on bullock carts or tractor trailers and spending a quarter of the day in search of just drinking and cooking water are no longer new. Nor is it shocking any longer that the upwardly mobile in the Indian cities of Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Delhi spend INR 20,000 (USD 290) a month to buy water from private tankers, with the tanker operators drawing more and more water from ever-falling aquifers further and further from the cities.

Are the politicians responding?

The main development promise made by the winning Bharatiya Janata Party in this summer’s election to Parliament has been to provide piped water to every Indian household by 2024. It cannot keep this promise unless it confronts the elephants in the room.

The biggest elephant is free electricity to farmers. This leads farmers to draw as much water from wherever they can – mainly underground – and use it for terribly inefficient flood irrigation. In a densely populated region where around 80% of water is used for irrigation, which accounts for the largest number of water pumps in the world, and there is no law to regulate groundwater extraction, the result is there for all to see. On top of water scarcity, we have over 60% of India’s population engaged in agriculture that produces around 11% of the country’s GDP. And we have near-bankrupt electricity distribution companies in almost every state.

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TheThirdPole.net, 28 June, 2019, https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/2019/06/28/agricultural-reforms-and-urban-accountability-key-to-water-management/


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