Bengaluru: With water-intensive crops being grown in water-stressed and scarce areas, subsidies offered by governments to farmers for buying crops at more than the market prices may have caused substantial declines in water tables in India, according to a recent publication in the journal Nature Communications by researchers from John Hopkins, Cornell and Stanford Universities.
However, farmer well-being and the environment need not necessarily be at odds with each other. Experts told The Wire that minimum support price (MSP) itself is not the villain here: it just needs to be re-thought creatively enough in a way that will provide price stability to farmers, and not only support farmer incomes but also increase them while ensuring sustainability at the same time.
Some ways to do that would be to bring in additional subsidies for crop diversification, and to promote more high-value crops and agricultural practices.
According to the publication’s analysis, subsidies to farmers have contributed to as much as a 30% over-production of water intensive crops like rice and wheat. For instance, in Punjab, the procurement of rice may have potentially accounted for at least 50% reduction in the groundwater table in the past 34 years.
Similarly, since the 2000s, the wheat procurement in Madhya Pradesh might have caused an increase in dry wells by 5.3 percentage points (pp) and consequently 3.4 pp in the usage of deep tubewells.
Also read: Amid Demand for MSP Guarantee, What Can Actually Protect Farmer Lives?
Deepratan Singh Khara, assistant professor of economics, Sri Guru Gobind Singh College, Chandigarh, says, “The study highlights the significant impact of output subsidies, such as guaranteed crop procurement, on groundwater depletion, particularly for water-intensive crops like rice in Punjab and wheat in Madhya Pradesh.”
Khara wasn’t involved in the study but has researched on groundwater irrigation in Punjab and Haryana.
“It underscores the need to reform the existing subsidy framework to ensure both food security and the sustainable improvement of farmers’ livelihoods,” he says and adds, “The prolonged practice of unlimited procurement at the minimum support price (MSP) has played a substantial role in the decline of water tables, calling for a re-evaluation of these policies to prevent further environmental degradation.”
However, MSP itself isn’t a bad concept, says Avinash Kishore, senior research fellow based in the Delhi office of the International Food Policy Research Institute. The problem, according to him, is rice being procured from Punjab, Haryana and even Telangana – states that are water-scarce.
“These are not the regions where rice should be grown,” he says. “So the focus should shift to procurement from water-rich states like Odhisha and Chattisgarh.”
Governments – central and state – and agencies like the Food Corporation of India lean heavily on Punjab and Haryana as they produce a surplus – considering they are dominantly wheat-eating states – compared to eastern states.
“So, rice is a cash crop that is sold by these states,” says Kishore.
Also read: Punjab: 111 Farmers Join Jagjit Singh Dallewal in Indefinite Hunger Strike For MSP Guarantee
He thinks to keep the MSP going, procurement should be strengthened from the eastern states, thus, reducing dependence on crops from water-scarce areas. The failure to do so is not only the Union government’s accountability but also of the respective governments of the eastern states.
While there has been research on the impact of input subsidies like free electricity, there is limited understanding of the impact of output subsidies on usage of water locally.
This is because of the subtle nature of output subsidies indirectly determining cropping decisions, in turn impacting groundwater.
On the other hand, electricity subsidies directly enable usage of pumps to extract groundwater. By collating data since 1981 from different sources, this study contributes to our understanding of erosion of India’s groundwater by quantifying the role of output subsidy policy.
“Most, if not all subsidies, are well intentioned. But the externalities they have come to impose on the environment have broadly been ignored in policy design,” according to the joint response by the authors of the study.
“It provides new quantitative evidence of the way in which subsidies in the agricultural sector, specifically output subsidies via MSP, influence a resource that is critical to it,” they say.
To arrive at the quantitative evidence, the study compiled many district level datasets of crop production, area and irrigation. They also considered procurement of rice and wheat by the central and state agencies, levels and stress of groundwater and district level tubewell construction.
District-level weather and precipitation data for the cropping season was also constructed by the study.
Defunct and dry wells were used as two additional metrics of groundwater stress in addition to the district level average groundwater level data. This is because they give a better understanding of groundwater stress across different regions due to differences in aquifer types.
In Punjab, where groundwater levels persist and adjust gradually due the deep alluvial aquifers, groundwater depth is considered as a measure of stress. Hard rock and mixed systems deplete and replete annually in Madhya Pradesh.
To assess groundwater stress, the study maps changes in groundwater levels over shorter horizons by considering occurrence of dry wells and tube well construction.
The study finds active wells become defunct by a 6.37 percentage point across Indian districts and a 50% increase in tubewell construction with the increase in the rate of growth in area under rice cultivation between 1996-2015.
In Punjab, between 1973 to 2016, the average groundwater depth increased from 4.82 metres below ground level (mbgl) to 14.55 mbgl. By 1973, 78.6% of all dug wells that were active had become defunct. The study finds the main factor for this depletion is the adoption of high-yielding rice and wheat varieties during the Green Revolution of the 1960s.
Local wheat, cotton, maize and oilseeds gave way to the high-yielding ones, which required more intensive irrigation. This came from dug and tubewells, causing groundwater depletion.
MSP for rice and wheat, the assured government procurement, incentivised by cultivation of the high-yielding varieties even as there was surplus of these crops, underlined the groundwater depletion.
Also read: An Increase in MSP Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Fair Price for Farmers
Kishore advises doing away with free electricity. He points to a couple of pilot experiments being carried out in Pondicherry and Gujarat. In these, the farmers are paid an X amount according to the size of their land and the electricity they need to irrigate the crops. The payment is an alternative to the subsidy.
The only difference being that the farmers are charged for every additional unit of electricity they use. This makes the farmer think of electricity as a cost, which if they didn’t use would be savings.
“Farmers still don’t trust these experiments yet but something needs to be done,” he says.
In Madhya Pradesh, the government agencies didn’t procure either wheat or rice, historically. But from 2008, a bonus on top of national MSP was announced by the state government, and procurement of wheat was significantly increased.
Between 2007 and 2016, the state saw a 70% increase in wheat procurement (from 0.057 to 4 million tons). Growth in wheat-cultivated areas between 2000-2008 is partly attributed to improved irrigation systems. But the procurement started to add to the irrigation demand.
For instance, in Punjab, this was met by dug and tubewells, rather than surface water.
Doubling of the wheat post 2008 caused a 3.9 pp rise in depth of groundwater level and a 7.6 pp increase in occurrence of dry wells.
“For Punjab we find that rice procurement can account for about 50% of the total groundwater decline in the last three decades,” say the researchers.
“In Madhya Pradesh, that overlays different types of aquifers and where procurement started much later in 2007, groundwater stress has started to manifest in different ways. The policy has led to an increase in the number of wells becoming dry or defunct, and the need for deep tubewells to draw water within 8 years of the start of wheat procurement,” they add.
Khara considers this study to be a novel approach by quantifying the specific impact of output subsidies on groundwater depletion across various regions of India.
“Beyond relying on average groundwater level data, it introduces more comprehensive measures of groundwater stress, such as the percentage of defunct wells and dry wells, which provide a more robust and accurate assessment of the effects of these subsidy policies,” he says.
“This multifaceted analysis enhances the understanding of how such policies contribute to environmental stress.”
While the objective of most farm policies is to provide price stability and support to farmer incomes, as results of this study suggest, they can often lead to unintended consequences, counterproductive to the policy’s original goal.
One of the ways to counter this, according to Kishore, would be to introduce crop diversification.
Besides the environment, this would also help the farmers in increasing their incomes. Kishore said that there should be incentives for cultivating higher value agriculture practices like livestock, fruits and vegetables, fisheries and horticulture.
“Even current cropping patterns dominated by rice and wheat, if you look at the GDP, milk is more profitable than rice and wheat, and maybe even pulses combined in terms of valve,” he says. This is easier said than done.
But by investing in crop research, changing cropping patterns that reduce climate risks, production risks, and at the same time creating financial instruments and support systems, farmers could be encouraged to think of alternatives.
“These things require investment and new imagination,” says Kishore. “The subsidy sucks everything away and there is very little left to invest.”
Vrushal Pendharkar is an independent journalist covering the environment.
This study was published in Nature Communications on 5 October.
