Tridge summary
India is facing a severe water shortage due to an incorrect incentive structure for agricultural water use, which accounts for 89% of total groundwater usage. This is largely due to government policies that promote the cultivation of water-intensive crops like paddy, wheat, and sugarcane, leading to depleting groundwater reserves and a decrease in the availability of pulses and oilseeds. Despite efforts to promote crop diversification towards less water-intensive crops, the profitability of these crops is unpredictable due to market price fluctuations and unstable yields. The article suggests that stable price policies, technology development for alternative crops, expanded controlled irrigation, and improved market infrastructure could encourage farmers to diversify their crops and conserve water. The author also emphasizes the potential for increasing crop diversity in high rainfall areas by promoting rainwater harvesting and improving market infrastructure for perishable horticultural crops.
Disclaimer:The above summary was generated by Tridge's proprietary AI model for informational purposes.
Original content
India faces an unprecedented water shortage. A prime reason for this is inapt incentive structure to use water in agriculture that already consumes 89 per cent of the available groundwater. Historically, governments have introduced policy incentives like free-electricity for agriculture to extract groundwater, highly subsidised canal water and cultivation of water-intensive and fertiliser-favoured crops like paddy, wheat and sugarcane, even in water-scarce areas like Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. This has resulted in accumulation of more than required reserve stocks of rice, wheat and sugar at the cost of short supplies of pulses and oilseeds and depleting groundwater. However, in recent years there have been some changes in the approach of both Union and state governments towards low-water consuming crops like pulses and oilseeds. There has been an increasing recognition of the fact that paddy consumes over 10 times more water than pulses and oilseeds that require just 500 ...
Source: Down To Earth
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