By – Shreya Parameshwaran
Abstract
India’s groundwater emergency is an environmental crisis and a crisis of structural inequities due to being the largest user of groundwater worldwide while facing rapidly accelerating depletion with Punjab’s extraction at 156% of sustainable limits along with widespread contamination from both geogenic and anthropogenic sources. As a consequence, more than 200 districts now have arsenic, fluoride, or nitrates present in their groundwater. Rural and marginalized populations who do not have the economic means to access alternative water sources bear much of the burden of these crises, as evidenced by fluorosis in Rajasthan and arsenic-related illnesses in West Bengal and Assam. The author examines the root cause of India’s groundwater crisis as a governance failure resulting from the outdated private property structure established by the Indian Easements Act of 1882, and stresses that to enact real change in water governance there must be a National Ground Water Governance Framework based upon the public trust doctrine and enforceable caps on extraction at the district level along with a system of industrial accountability.
Introduction: The Crisis You Cannot See
The ground water crisis in India is primarily due to a lack of awareness. Aquifers do not suddenly become dry, and the presence of arsenic in a handpump cannot be seen right away. A community is often unaware that they have been consuming water that was contaminated until it is too late. By the time they find out about the exposure from deformities caused by fluorosis in one of the villages in Rajasthan or through the testing of shallow aquifers that were found to have high levels of arsenic in many areas across West Bengal, there has already been significant damage from years of contamination. India is the largest consumer of groundwater in the world and provides drinking water to 85% of the rural population in the country, and supports a highly populated agricultural system that provides food to hundreds of millions of people around the world. However extraction from aquifer systems has been occurring at such a faster rate than these systems are able to replenish themselves that the World Bank has warned that 60% of aquifers in India will be in a state of crisis within 20 years. Contamination due to agricultural runoff, industrial discharge and failing sewage treatment facilities contributes to the currently extent of contamination.
What makes this an equity crisis and not merely an environmental one is the pattern of who suffers. The rural poor and marginalised communities suffer the brunt of the impacts, despite not being responsible for the over extraction of our water resources or the introduction of the pollutants. It is because of this inequity that this is considered an equity issue rather than an environmental issue.
How the Crisis Works: Depletion, Contamination, and Their Compounding Effect
The groundwater crisis is not due to any one issue, but a combination of numerous structural and interacting issues. The largest issue is a decrease in the amount of water extracted for agriculture. The CGWB’s National Compilation on Dynamic Ground Water Resources (2024) estimates that 245.64 BCM are taken out of the ground every year, of which over 94% is used for irrigation. In addition, the widespread availability of subsidised electricity for agriculture will ensure continued abstracting of groundwater even if aquifers do not have enough water.
Beyond depletion, there is also a groundwater contamination crisis and pollution from industries is a major contributor to groundwater contamination. Industrial sources — including tanneries in Kanpur, which the Supreme Court of India addressed in M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (1987), noting that the heavy metals and toxic effluents go directly into the aquifer that supplies the Ganges River. Natural geogenic contaminants such as fluoride and arsenic exist in rock formations in parts of Rajasthan, West Bengal and Assam. As aquifer levels drop, the concentrations of these contaminants in groundwater can increase and present more risk to those who use this source of water. As aquifer levels decline due to depletion, the remaining groundwater will become progressively more saline and/or more toxic as well as increasingly expensive to extract, especially for the people least able to access deeper wells or other sources of water.
Case Study: Punjab and Haryana
Since the 1960′s, the Green Revolution in India has led to Punjab and Haryana becoming the engines of change that transitioned India from a food-deficit to a food-surplus country. Unfortunately, this transition did not include a sustainability plan for the ground water extraction used to achieve this transition. As a result, today, five decades later, the consequences of this unsustainable usage are stark. According to the Indian Express, the CGWB’s National Compilation on Dynamic Ground Water Resources of India 2025 reveals that Punjab’s ground water extraction is currently at 156.36% of its natural recharge rate – the highest in the nation. Haryana has the second highest rate of ground water extraction at 136.75% of its natural recharge rate. Punjab has an estimated annual volume of 18.60 billion cubic metres (BCM) of total annual ground water recharge, which is significantly more than the volume of water that can be sustainably extracted from the state each year, which is 16.80 BCM. However, the total volume of ground water extracted from the Punjab state is 26.27 BCM each year, creating a deficit that cannot be overcome by recharging the aquifer through the monsoon season. The resulting cycle of debt created by this situation is great for small and marginal farmers who are forced to borrow money to drill deeper for water, result in producing lower crop yields, and accrue increasing amounts of agricultural debt that can all be directly attributed to the depletion of the aquifers in the state. The Punjab policy response to this situation includes the Punjab Groundwater Extraction and Conservation Directions, 2023; however, serious regulatory gaps and weaknesses in regulatory enforcement remain.
Who Bears the Health Burden and legal framework
Groundwater is generally not consumed by those who are accountable for its pollution. In Rajasthan, many rely on groundwater for daily needs; the presence of fluoride in the water supply has resulted in fluorosis, an ailment associated with deformities of the bones and damage to the teeth. Many families use shallow aquifers in West Bengal and Assam for water, and thousands are suffering from the effects of arsenic contamination, which can cause skin disorders, liver disease and increases in the chance of developing cancer. The CGWB’s (Central Groundwater Board) 2024 Annual Groundwater Quality Report lists numerous districts with confirmed contamination of groundwater from arsenic, fluoride, nitrates and uranium. Urban households have alternate means of acquiring drinking water, such as the purchase of bottled water or the installation of a filtration device, but rural poor households lack the financial resources for these means. In addition, a study conducted by the World Bank in 2022 determined that the incidence of poverty is 9-10% higher in districts with groundwater tables at or below 8 metres, indicating that the groundwater crisis has exacerbated existing socioeconomic disparities.
India’s existing legal framework regarding groundwater is founded upon colonialism. Section 7 of the Indian Easements Act of 1882 states that landowners are entitled to “collect and dispose of all water under the land within his own limits”; therefore, groundwater is treated as property of the landowner. As remarked by the National Law School of India Review, there are no restrictions on landowners’ unlimited rights to extract groundwater, landowners are not liable for contaminating it, and therefore there can be no enforceable rights for communities. Therefore, India’s legal framework provides an inadequate regulatory structure for responding to an ongoing national groundwater emergency.
What Needs to Change
The path forward requires legislative, not just administrative, reform. India requires a national governance framework for underground water based on the common-law public trust doctrine to replace the easements model from 1882. The framework would create limits on the extraction of groundwater within each district based on verified recharge data at the district level, hold industrial polluters liable for polluting the groundwater they extract, and begin the process to grant community legal standing to challenge the destruction of aquifers. In addition, environmental tribunals need to be funded adequately to hear the challenges brought by communities.
There is also a vital need for agricultural reform to address the crisis, and the agricultural reform must be carefully calibrated. Therefore, when transitioning from traditional irrigation to micro-irrigation and from traditional, water-intensive crops to more water-efficient crops while rationalising the price of electricity, strong social protection measures need to be put in place to ensure that the burden of correcting the government’s failure of a structural policy does not fall disproportionately on those least able to bear it. For example, drip irrigation has demonstrated savings and efficiency in pilots conducted in Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the legislatively mandated use of drip irrigation should be considered for over-extracted areas.
Finally, communities living near sites of industrial pollution should have access to legal assistance, functioning environmental courts and mandated environmental remediation funds collected from the authorised industrial polluters who caused the environmental damage. The groundwater crisis occurred due to a failure of governance; therefore, the solution will require institutional responses, not just technical fixes.
Conclusion
The crisis regarding groundwater in India is ultimately a reflection of poor governance – a resource that has been over-utilised, a law that is frozen in time and an allocation system that is terribly unfair. The science is conclusive, there is plenty of data and the communities that suffer the consequences are easy to locate for those who have the desire to see. What has been missing is a political will; without viewing groundwater as a public trust rather than as private property and without institutional upgrade to correct administrative inertia, the crisis will continue to grow – quietly, without being seen, and beyond repair.
About the Author
I am Shreya Parameshwaran and I am a law student with a fervent commitment to justice as well its environmental counterpart. I’m interested in how we can ensure human dignity, protect land sovereignty and challenge dominative structures that threaten people and the planet. I utilize legal research and writing to speak the language of the law and aid people on the frontlines of ecological conflict defend their rights.
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