ABSTRACT
Irrigation has always been central to the life and society in the plains of South Asia, i.e., India, Pakistan, southern Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. India’s water policy-making is yet to fully factor in the epochal transformation in the way its farmers water their crops, and successive governments have kept investing billions of dollars on constructing new surface reservoirs and canal networks even as the existing ones have begun falling into disuse. The meteoric rise of the atomistic groundwater economy demanded a bold new thinking and resource allocation strategy to evolve a groundwater management regime with practical supply- and demand-side strategies. Climate change is expected to significantly alter India’s hydro-climatic regime over the 21st century. The Indo-Gangetic aquifer system has been heavy recharged by the Himalayan snowmelt. Aquifers respond to droughts and climate fluctuations much more slowly than surface storages.
