-The Times of India PILIBHIT: Raising concern over depleting groundwater, State Wetland Authority (SWA) has decided to ban the cultivation of summer paddy that survives only on the groundwater. According to an estimate of the state agriculture department, summer paddy — the transplantation of which has already been started — is produced in around 3.5 lakh hectares in more than 20 districts of western UP stretched up to the Tarai region. The decision...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Number crunching helps farmers manage water -Manu Moudgil
-IndiaWaterPortal.org Calculating water availability and crop budgeting can prevent over-extraction of groundwater and mounting farm debt. At 42 years, Bhagwat Ghagare seems young. But he is old enough to have seen his village prosper and decline many times. Farming had traditionally been small and distress migration rampant at Kumbharwadi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Between 1998 and 2002, a non-profit organisation, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), initiated a work related to rainwater harvesting...
More »Share of tubewells in irrigation rising -Radheshyam Jadhav
-The Hindu Business Line Across India, groundwater schemes are up, but surface water schemes are declining Pune: In 14 years (2001-02 to 2014-15), net irrigation in India increased just 20 per cent, with an alarming trend of massive groundwater extraction. Per data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, while 41 per cent of the net irrigated area in India got water from tube wells in 2001-02, tubewell irrigation increased to...
More »Ganga basin States stare at three-fold rise in crop failures by 2040 -Jacob Koshy
-The Hindu As flows decline and pollution worsens, there will be less irrigation and drinking water available in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh New Delhi: The Ganga river basin could see crop failures rise three-fold and drinking water shortage go up by as much as 39% in some States between now and 2040, says an assessment commissioned by the World Bank and submitted to the Central Water Commission. If there is no intervention,...
More »Knee-Jerk Reactions Won't Solve India's Groundwater Crisis -Nitya Jacob
-TheWire.in Aquifers at all levels are being depleted. There is thus an urgent need to review and enact the long-pending model groundwater bill. As winter tips into summer, the next round of water struggles will begin. By February, hand pumps across rural India will start going dry. People in urban centres, mostly small towns living off small stores of groundwater, will start getting increasingly erratic supply. The government will once again initiate...
More »