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Village women stand near a well which dries up during the summer months near the Coca Cola Co. bottling plant in Mehediganj, Varanasi. India draws 230 cubic kilometers of groundwater a year, more than a quarter of the global total, World Bank data shows. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg.
Savitri Rai winces as she recounts how police beat her when she protested against groundwater extraction at a Coca-Cola Co. (KO:US) plant near her farm in India. A decade later, she said her water supplies keep dwindling.
“We have to dig ever deeper wells,” the 60-year-old said outside her mud house in Mehadiganj village in Uttar Pradesh state, blaming the beverage company’s bottling line a kilometer (0.6 miles) away. Coca-Cola, which declined to comment on Rai’s allegations, in August scrapped a $24 million expansion at the site, citing delays in permits to extract more water.
Such flashpoints add pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to improve groundwater management in the world’s biggest user of the resource as he seeks to transform India into a manufacturing hub. Growing aquifer overexploitation by farms, businesses and cities imperils India’s development goals, according to the World Bank, signaling challenges for industries from mining to brewing in need of reliable water sources.
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“You have unregulated use of a resource which is not easily renewed,” said Upmanu Lall, a professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University in New York. “It’s a really significant concern over the whole country.”
India draws 230 cubic kilometers of groundwater a year, more than a quarter of the global total, World Bank data shows. Agriculture uses the most, growing about 70 percent of India’s grains with it, followed by industry.
Arm’s Length
The $1.9 trillion economy operates the world’s biggest food subsidy program, and about 742 million people live in rural areas, making farming an economic lifeline.
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While groundwater is the main drinking water for more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, pollutants such as arsenic make it unfit for humans in a third of India’s 600 districts, WWF India and Accenture Plc said last year. The country faces some of the world’s worst water challenges, they said.
In Mehadiganj, about 20 kilometers from the holy city of Varanasi, 28-year-old farmer Sabita Rai said she used to extract water with buckets attached to ropes only as long as her arm. Then the wells dried up.
“We’re too poor to drill deeper,” she said, adding that her searches for water now extend further from her home.