India’s “green revolution” in the 1960s was hailed globally for combining policy and scientific advances in agriculture — bringing food security to the newly independent country. A surge in yields and production of staple crops, such as rice and wheat, helped prevent the famines that had blighted the country under British colonial rule.
But the intensification of Indian farming in the decades since has spawned a series of challenges of its own, from chemical pollution to price distortion. One of the greatest of all is unsustainable water use.
India, with a population of 1.4bn, is among the most water-stressed countries in the world. A report from the government’s NITI Aayog think-tank in 2019 estimated that 600mn Indians faced “high to extreme water stress”, and warned that 21 big cities — including the capital New Delhi — would run out of groundwater in a matter of years.