event 09 ene. 2017

Research // Water Food Energy Nexus: Changing Scenarios in India during recent Decades

By Beas Barik, Subimal Ghosh, A. Saheer Sahana, Amey Pathak and Muddu Sekhar. Meeting the growing water and food demands in a densely populated country like India is a major challenge, requiring extensive investigations into the changing patterns of the checks and balances behind the maintenance of food security at the expense of depleting groundwater, along with high energy consumption. Here we present a comprehensive set of analyses which assess the present status of the water-food-energy nexus in India, along with its changing pattern, in the last few decades.

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(C) flickr / Lee Tucker
We find that with the growth of population and consequent increase in the food demands, the food production has also increased and this has been made possible with the intensification of irrigation. However, during the recent decade (after 1996), the increase in food production has not been sufficient to meet its growing demands precipitating a decline in the per-capita food availability. We also find a statistically significant declining trend of ground water storage in India during the last decade, as derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite datasets. Regional studies reveal contrasting trends between Northern and West-Central India. North-Western India and the Middle Ganga Basin shows a decrease in the groundwater storage as opposed to an increasing storage over West-Central India. Comparison with well-data reveals that the highest consistency of GRACE derived storage data with available well measurements, are in the Middle-Ganga basin. After analysing the data for the last two decades, we further showcase that after a drought, the groundwater storage drops but is unable to recover to its original condition even after good monsoon years. The groundwater storage reveals a very strong negative correlation with the electricity consumption for agricultural usage, which may also be considered as a proxy for groundwater pumped for irrigation in a region. The electricity usage for agricultural purposes has an increasing trend and interestingly, it does not have any correlation with the monsoon rainfall as computed with the original or de-trended variables. This reveals an important finding that the irrigation has been intensified irrespective of rainfall. This also resulted in a decreasing correlation between the food production and monsoon rainfall revealing the increasing dependency of agricultural activities on irrigation. We conclude that irrigation has now become essential for agriculture to meet the food demand; however, it should be judiciously regulated and controlled, based on the water availability from monsoon rainfall, specifically after the drought years, as it is essential to recover from the deficits suffered previously.

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Hydrology and Earth System Science website

Published

December 2016

In

Hydrology and Earth System Science, doi:10.5194/hess-2016-647, in review, 2016

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