Posted on 27-8-2004

Asia Being Sucked Dry
26.08.2004, Reuters

LONDON - Asian farmers drilling millions of pump-operated wells in an
ever-deeper search for water are threatening to suck the continent's
underground reserves dry, a science magazine warned on Wednesday.

"This little-heralded crisis is repeating itself across Asia and could
cause widespread famine in the decades to come," London-based New
Scientist said in a report on scientists' findings at a recent water
conference in Sweden.

The worst affected country is India.

There, small farmers have abandoned traditional shallow wells where
bullocks draw water in leather buckets to drill 21 million tube wells
hundreds of metres below the surface using technology adapted from the oil
industry, the magazine said.

Another million wells a year are coming into operation in India to
irrigate rice, sugar cane and alfalfa round-the-clock.

While the US$600 ($939) pumps have brought short-term prosperity to many
and helped make India a major rice exporter in less than a generation,
future implications are dire, New Scientist said.

"So much water is being drawn from underground reserves that they, and the
pumps they feed, are running dry, turning fields that have been fecund for
generations into desert," it said.

Tushaar Shah, head of the International Water Management Institute's
groundwater station in Gujarat, said there was no control over the
expansion of pumps and wells.

"When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India,"
he said at the annual Stockholm Water Symposium.

Shah said Indian farmers were taking 200 cubic kilometres of water out of
the earth per year, with only a fraction of that replaced by the monsoon
rains.

"The same revolution is being replicated across Asia, with millions of
tube wells pumping up precious underground water reserves in
water-stressed countries like Pakistan, Vietnam, and in northern China,"
the New Scientist report said.

In China's breadbasket, the northern plain, 30 cubic kilometres more water
is pumped to the surface each year than is replaced by rain, it said.
Officials have said water shortages will soon make China dependent on
grain imports.

Vietnam has quadrupled its number of tube wells in the past decade to 1
million, while water tables are plunging in the Pakistani state of Punjab,
which produces 90 per cent of the country's food, New Scientist added.

In India, "farmers have invested some US$12 billion in the new pumps, but
they constantly have to drill deeper to keep pace with falling water
tables", it said.

Meanwhile, half of India's traditional hand-dug wells and millions of
shallower tube wells have already dried up, "bringing a spate of suicides
among those who rely on them".

Another consequence is electricity blackouts, reaching "epidemic
proportions" in some Indian states where half of the power is used to pump
water from up to a kilometre down.

To counter the water crisis, some states are placing small dams across
riverbeds in a bid to replenish groundwater by infiltration, and Hindu
priests are organising farmers to capture monsoon rains in ponds, the
report said.

But the Indian government has gone cool on a proposed $200 billion River
Interlinking Project to redistribute water round the country. "In any
case, the water supplied would probably come too late," New Scientist
said.