India’s Groundwater Problem is No Longer Scarcity: It is Insolvency
The “water bankruptcy” lens exposes why India’s groundwater governance, designed for crisis management, cannot operate under conditions of permanent scarcity
A background note can be accessed here: UN-Habitat: Water Scarcity to Water Bankruptcy
Dr Gayathri D. Naik: Assistant Professor & Co-Director, Centre for Environmental Law Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA), National Law School of India University
SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation | SDG 13: Climate Action | SDG 15: Life on Land
Ministry of Jal Shakti | Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change | Central Ground Water Board
Water scarcity in India has shifted from an episodic disruption to a structural condition. Climate change and long-standing anthropogenic interventions have pushed water systems toward critical thresholds, beyond which recovery within human time scales is no longer assured. Yet policy responses continue to operate as though scarcity is temporary – something to be mitigated, managed, and normalised. The emerging idea of water bankruptcy captures this disjuncture. It describes a condition in which extraction persistently exceeds safe recharge limits, rendering depletion effectively irreversible and exposing the limits of governance systems designed around recoverability.
Groundwater at the Core of India’s Water Vulnerability
India is the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, relying on it to sustain irrigation, drinking water supply, and rural livelihoods. Yet groundwater governance remains anchored in a land–water nexus that treats access to water as an extension of land ownership. Extraction rights are effectively individual and decentralised, while public intervention remains limited, particularly in irrigation.
This governance architecture implicitly assumes that depletion can be corrected through periodic intervention, and offset through infrastructure and recharge. Subsidies and technologies that reduce the marginal cost of extraction reinforce this logic, normalising intensive use, while postponing confrontation with absolute ecological limits. As a result, many aquifers are pushed well beyond sustainable recharge capacity.
This architecture appears workable under a conventional scarcity framework, where overuse is treated as a deviation rather than a permanent condition. Once critical thresholds are crossed, however, its limitations become structural rather than administrative.
Why Crisis-Based Governance Fails Under Irreversibility
Irreversible depletion breaks the logic on which crisis-based water governance rests. Command-and-control regulation assumes that overuse can be corrected; while emergency responses presume that “normal” conditions will return. When depletion becomes non-recoverable, these tools lose their corrective function.
Planning must shift from managing flows to governing decline and regulation from smoothing variability to enforcing limits. Yet existing governance categories – crisis response, infrastructure provisioning, routine resource management – are not designed to operate under conditions where recovery is no longer possible, creating an institutional blind spot. This mismatch explains why policy responses often appear active while remaining ecologically ineffective.
When Depletion Locks In Inequality
Irreversible depletion also sharpens the equity implications of India’s groundwater regime. Land ownership in India is deeply unequal, shaped by caste, gender, and class hierarchies. Because access and extraction are mediated through land and capital-intensive infrastructure, the benefits of groundwater use accrue disproportionately to landowning groups.
The costs of depletion, however – falling water tables, rising extraction costs, deteriorating quality – are socialised. Landless and marginalised communities face declining access without having benefited from past extraction. These inequities become locked-in outcomes, transmitted across generations and embedded in the structure of access itself.
In this context, inequality is not merely a distributive failure. It is a consequence of governance rules that convert historical advantage into permanent water security while externalising ecological loss onto those with the least capacity to adapt.
Governing Water in a Bankruptcy Era
Irreversible scarcity also complicates how policy success is assessed. Indicators such as expanded coverage or infrastructure creation can coexist with long-term ecological decline. When governance is oriented toward access and assets, progress may be recorded even as the resource base continues to erode. Under conditions of permanent limits, such metrics become increasingly misleading.
The central question, then, is not how to manage groundwater scarcity more efficiently, but how to govern groundwater when depletion is no longer a risk but a condition. This requires a shift in governance logic: from assuring extraction to governing depletion; from individual control to collective constraint; from responding after damage occurs to acting before ecological thresholds are crossed.
Groundwater insolvency is not a distant warning for India. It is a diagnostic condition that exposes the widening gap between existing governance design and ecological reality – and a test of whether water policy can adapt to operate within limits that can no longer be deferred or denied.
Author:
Views are personal.