Punjab's Rice Boom Is Draining Its Groundwater, New Study Warns

Friday, 16 October 2026

Punjab, long celebrated as the "breadbasket of India" for the role it played in the Green Revolution, is facing a deepening groundwater crisis that a new study says was largely manufactured by the very policies that made the state an agricultural powerhouse.

The research, by Anandita Sarkar and published in the journal Regional Sustainability, traces how decades of subsidised electricity and guaranteed government procurement of rice and wheat pushed farmers toward water-intensive paddy cultivation and private tube wells, at the expense of the state's water table. Punjab made agricultural electricity free in 1997, with the state's southern zone following in 2006. Combined with assured purchase prices for rice and wheat, the subsidies gave farmers little incentive to conserve water. Water tables in several districts are now falling by close to one metre a year, according to the study, summarised this week by India Water Portal.

The shift has been stark. Private tube wells, which produced more than twice the grain output of poorly maintained public canal systems, came to dominate irrigation in central Punjab, while farmers in the state's south moved away from cotton toward rice after subsidies made tube-well-fed paddy more attractive. Punjab's rice yield, at 4,366 kilograms per hectare, is now the highest of any Indian state, but the study found that rainfall patterns — not policy — remain the single most decisive factor in groundwater behaviour under the current mix of crops, meaning the water table is at the mercy of the monsoon even as extraction keeps climbing.

Punjab has tried to slow the decline. The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, passed in 2009, bars summer paddy transplanting before 15 June to align planting with the monsoon, and power rationing limits farmers to four to six hours of daily electricity during the peak June–August irrigation months. A 2018 pilot scheme, Pani Bachao Paisa Kamao, paid farmers for electricity they saved by offering daytime power and cash incentives; it cut consumption by 7.5 to 30 percent without reducing yields, according to the study. Laser land levelling, meanwhile, has been shown to cut water use by 20 to 25 percent.

But the study argues these remain partial fixes. It calls for integrated governance that treats crops, water and energy as one system, rather than through separate departments; crop diversification toward millets, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and vegetables; wider adoption of water-saving methods such as Direct Seeded Rice, which can cut water use by 15 to 20 percent; and, most contentiously, a move away from free electricity toward volumetric pricing or water-use quotas. Universal metering of agricultural pumps — a prerequisite for such reform — remains one of the lowest in India, and no political party has yet been willing to end free power for farmers.