Shama Perveen, 2010 AGU: “Quantifying the Dimensions of the Water Crisis in India”

India’s Water Is Running Out

by Kevin Krajick, state of the planet blog, The Earth Institute, Columbia University, December 14, 2010



India is running “the largest water-mining project in the world”–and it cannot be sustained much longer, Columbia Water Center researcher Shama Perveen told an audience on Monday. That is mainly because farmers, who depend heavily on irrigation water drawn from underground aquifers, are using far more water than rainfall can replenish. Perveen’s talk, “Quantifying the Dimensions of the Water Crisis in India,” contained a series of daunting statistics:

Satellite imagery shows dropping groundwater tables across much of northern India. (GRACE/Tiwari et al., 2009)

–India’s northern breadbasket region, home to 600 million people, lost about 60 cubic kilometers of water from its groundwater aquifers in 2002-2008.

–Farmers who used to pump water from five or 10 feet below the surface are now sometimes drilling down 200 or 300 feet.

–Large parts of India contain at least 200 people per square kilometer–the population density of New York City–and it is getting denser.

–Unlike the United States and Australia, which have dams that can store up to 6,000 cubic meters of water for each person, India has a dismal storage capacity of 200 cubic meters per capita.

Perveen says that building dams will not suffice, because of the extreme imbalance between rains and usage; in some regions, dams would have to hold five years’ worth of rainfall just to keep up. In the future, India will have to make irrigation far more efficient and switch from water-intensive crops like rice, she said.

Link:  http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/12/14/indias-water-is-running-out/