Water usage, policies and technological interventions in the field of agriculture in India
World Water Day, held by the UN on 22 March every year since 1993, focuses on the importance of freshwater. World Water Day celebrates water and raises awareness of the 2.2 billion people living without access to safe water and taking action to tackle the global water crisis. A core focus of World Water Day is to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 6: water and sanitation for all by 2030.
In this month’s article, we focus on water usage in the field of agriculture, the policies that support water management in agriculture in India and how technology interventions can help in achieving SDG 6.
Water in Agriculture
In India, water availability per capita has declined from 5000 cubic metres (m3) per annum in 1950 to around 2000 m3 now and is projected to decline to 1500 m3 by 2025 leading to far less water availability for agriculture. The water availability for agricultural use has reached a critical level as the country uses more than 80 per cent of the surface water for the agricultural sector alone. On the other hand, inefficient and dilapidated canal irrigation systems have led to a sharp dip in groundwater development. India is the largest user of groundwater in the world with over 60 per cent of irrigated agriculture and 85 per cent of drinking water supplies dependent on aquifers.
Water scarcity occurs when water supply is insufficient to meet water demand. This condition arises as a consequence of a high rate of aggregate demand from all water-using sectors compared with available supply, under the prevailing institutional arrangements and infrastructural conditions.
Cities and industries compete with agriculture for the use of water and an increasing number of countries, or regions within countries, are reaching alarming levels of water stress and pollution.
Water overuse occurs when withdrawals exceed recharge rates, eventually leading to water scarcity. Groundwater use in agriculture and other sectors has increased substantially since the middle of the twentieth century and, in many areas, annual groundwater withdrawals exceed the rate of natural recharge.
Policies in India, and their impact
With increasing weather variabilities; climate change will continue to pose risks to water availability for agriculture. All countries have to take note of this inevitable fact and repurpose both irrigation and power policies to incentivise farmers to save water. Focus on sustainable water usage under climate change could in fact be a long-term solution to the challenges of inadequate food and water supplies.
In India the input subsidies and commodity price policies favour crops like paddy that are water intensive. Several states offer free electricity to draw out groundwater for irrigation. Subsidy-based approach to irrigate farm lands has led to negative environmental consequences in many parts of India. In Punjab (North India) over-exploitation of ground water due to subsidies on power has already led to an alarming situation. Studies indicate that ground water is depleting at a rate of 0.3 to 1.00 meter annually. As per a NASA study, the annual withdrawal of ground water from North-West India is 13 to 17 Km3 which is moving out of aquifers and not replenishing.
With water table going down drastically due to overexploitation, expenditure on re-digging of borewells and higher capacity motors is also unavoidable. To deal with this crisis, aquifer recharge and rainwater conservation through community ponds and recharge wells is being promoted with involvement of gram sabhas. But the extent to which this has helped improve needs to be quantified.
In Punjab, Department of Agriculture and Power is collaborating with the World Bank to pilot a new direct-payment scheme called Paani Bachao, Paise Kamao (“Save Water, Earn Money”) to provide a financial benefit to farmers who consume less electricity than the specified threshold to mitigate trade-offs arising from policy change. This scheme does not penalize producers whose consumption is above the fixed allocation, but farmers receive a message about their savings and electricity consumption
Sharing of borewells by a group of farmers is another possibility which the WASSAN (Watershed Support Services and Activities Network) has already worked on in Andhra Pradesh. Such instances, though on a small scale, offer hope as they are easier to replicate.
Conservation techniques like zero-tillage, raised-bed planting, precision farming and drip or sprinkler irrigation have shown good results in soil and water conservation but needs further improvement in technology for wider acceptance. System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has caught imagination of several farmers especially in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh as a water-conserving method of paddy cultivation.
Government of India is committed to provide high priority to water conservation and its management. To this effect Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) has been formulated with the vision of extending the coverage of irrigation ‘Har Khet ko pani’ and improving water use efficiency ‘More crop per drop’ in a focused manner with end to end solution on source creation, distribution, management, field application and extension activities.
National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) has been formulated for enhancing agricultural productivity especially in rain-fed areas focusing on integrated farming, water use efficiency, soil health management and synergising resource conservation.
NMSA will cater to key dimensions of ‘Water use efficiency’, ‘Nutrient Management’ and ‘Livelihood diversification’ through adoption of sustainable development pathway by progressively shifting to environmental friendly technologies, adoption of energy efficient equipment, conservation of natural resources, integrated farming, etc.
‘More crop-per drop’ has been the mantra of current public policies around irrigation water. Promotion of micro-irrigation practices (sprinkler and drip) through number of schemes and programs by the Government has been localised in few States as of now (7.7 million hectares of micro-irrigation, 95 % of which is in 10 states), which should proliferate to larger crop areas (potential of micro-irrigation in India is 69.5 million hectares). We need to move from a supply-based to demand-based system to reach the huge micro-irrigation potential.
Suitable policies with incentives mechanism could lead more farmers to adopt such technologies that aim to “irrigate the crop and not the land”.
Good agricultural practices, based on soil management, water, fertility and pest control, combined with improved access to markets, can lead to significant improvements in agricultural productivity, adapting to climate change with little impact on water resources. For example, Conservation Agriculture (CA), based on minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil cover and crop rotations, holds tremendous potential for all sizes of farms and agro-ecological systems.
Technological interventions
Crop specific irrigation management practices should be aimed at improving or restoring natural ecosystems. In many high value crops, precision irrigation models and controls like variable-rate drip irrigation and other micro-irrigation systems are gaining wide acceptance including in India. Smart irrigation systems with increased usage of information and communication technology (ICT) and remote sensing have been in use in advanced economies like USA, Japan and Israel. Such precision irrigation management systems bring water-use-efficiency to the maximum and needs adoption at a higher scale in India.
Given the increasing demands for water in competing sectors, the notion that agriculture must “produce more food with less water” has taken hold. While compelling, this concept can lead to misconceptions since it does not distinguish between the water diverted and applied to farm fields, and the water transpired in the process of generating crop yields. Much of the water applied in irrigation runs-off or percolates into shallow groundwater, where it is available for further use in irrigation or for other purposes. Only the portion of water consumed by the crop during transpiration, and the water that evaporates from plant and soil surfaces, is ‘lost’ from the system at this point in the hydrologic cycle.
FAO recommends that ‘water productivity’ be the metric of choice given that it is not scale-dependent, unlike ‘irrigation efficiency’, and can be applied in a wider sense and multiple contexts due to the possibility of assigning monetary, economic, social and production terms to the numerator.
Existing data on water resources and use are uneven and inadequate to support many of the policy decisions, including the implementation of SDG 6 i.e. Monitoring systems for water, data base and information systems, and modelling capabilities aided by remote sensing technologies are to be more systematically supported and strengthened.
Water accounting helps societies to understand their water endowment: how much water there is, where it is, how it is used, and whether current patterns of use are sustainable in future. While water accounting refers to a systematic study of the current status and future trends in both water supply and demand in a given spatial domain, water audit places this account into the broader framework of institutions, finance and the overall political economy. Water auditing presents a systematic review of resources, infrastructure, demand and access, combined with understanding of governance, finance and the overall political and social context. For example, in the context of a village irrigation system, the problem can be either infrastructural (e.g. a pump breakdown), societal (e.g. social exclusion from using certain water points) or resource related (e.g. falling groundwater levels). As such, water auditing provides valuable information to identify problems and their underlying causes, and facilitates politically acceptable and practically possible solutions in the context of a district, a country or a large transboundary river basin.
We at GramworkX are looking to change the landscape of agriculture and its allied business. With increasing demands in agricultural produce and vagaries of nature the confluence of agriculture and technology is inevitable. We believe in incorporating analytics, automation, product and process innovation for better resource utilisation and help increase the productivity.
Our solution helps in quantifying and providing analytical insights into water consumption patterns across fields and soil types and providing data support systems into the amount of water required for irrigation. This will enable optimal water consumption using automation and capability building tools to enable resource management.
We aim to bring predictability to farming and are developing a cloud based smart farm resource management tool, which helps the farmer’s guide, optimise and monitor utilisation of water.
References:
[1] https://thewaterproject.org/water-crisis/water-in-crisis-india
[2]http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Incentivizing_Food_Systems_Transformation.pdf
