Budgets are usually tallied in rupees, but Shaitan Singh Songira, a 44-year-old farmer from Rajasthan’s Sirohi district, demonstrates how the same discipline can be applied to water. As the president of his village’s water committee, he presides over a fragile equilibrium; weighing how much his community can draw now without depriving itself in the future. He measures fields not just in harvests, but in the worth of water that nurtures them.
Reimagining Water Usage in Agriculture
For generations, farmers had equated abundance of water with abundance of crops and, by extension, more income. Songira showed them that prosperity could be multiplied even with the same amount of water. Farmers who once inundated their crops with little regard, now practise frugal watering, convinced that restraint can coexist with prosperity. Their experience underscores a larger truth: the endurance of communities, and the livelihoods they sustain, will depend on how optimally water is used.
India holds 18 per cent of the world’s population, yet has access to barely 4 per cent of global freshwater. Agriculture alone consumes more than four-fifths of the nation’s water, and is deeply intertwined with both water availability and economic well-being. Scarcity here is not an ecological concept but a tangible economic deficit.
A Threat to Both Ecology and Economy
India irrigates extensively but wastefully, using two-to-threefold more water per tonne of crop compared to its global counterparts. Productivity is still gauged by output per hectare rather than efficiency per unit of water. The result is deceptive abundance: farmers harvest more, but their incomes remain precarious as groundwater declines and energy costs of pumping rise. The question one should ask is not “How much can I grow per hectare?” but rather, “How much income can I derive per litre of water?” Reconceptualising efficiency can recast water as a generator of livelihoods rather than a constraint upon them. Taking a ‘One Water’ approach offers a structured pathway for this transition; recognising rainfall, rivers, and even reclaimed wastewater as components of a single interconnected cycle.
Climate volatility – erratic monsoons, scorching temperatures, and intense, short-duration rainfall events – intensifies pressures on water resources and rural livelihoods. Farmers perceive this disruption viscerally: parched wells, heat-scorched crops, or sudden, unseasonal floods that strip fertile topsoil, yet fail to recognise one of the key underlying drivers – climate change. Farmers should be able to connect observable anomalies to the underlying root causes. It is our imperative to simplify technical concepts such as runoff and precipitation variability, enabling farmers to grasp the “why” behind their lived realities. Only then does informed action emerge, which can manifest in two forms: adaptation and mitigation.
Water Management as Livelihood Security
The very water-budgeting that Songira applies was cultivated with support from industry experts. Through the ‘Water Security Programme’ implemented by the Centre for MicroFinance (CMF), an affiliate of Tata Trusts, his village water committee received structured guidance: crafting water security plans, technical and financial support, seeding water-augmentation and conservation systems, building capacity in panchayats and local institutions, leveraging government schemes, and ensuring quality drinking water. This illustrates a clear lesson: when empowered with knowledge, technical guidance, and institutional backing, people can learn to conserve resources, and more broadly, secure livelihoods, enhance resilience, and create a model for sustainable prosperity for others to emulate.
Individual and collective efforts need to address both supply augmentation and demand management. The supply-side measures, including watershed restoration and soil-moisture conservation, must converge with demand-side strategies like crop diversification and water use efficiency that prioritise thrift over excess.
No less a priority is cultivating an ethic of vigilance. Too often, water becomes a focus only when there’s news of cuts or shortages – suddenly everyone is alert, suddenly every drop counts. But why wait for a crisis? True sustainability comes with judicious use of water, whether scarcity looms or not. When communities internalise the value of water, every drop can be conserved and utilised with care. The ‘One Water, One Community’ model puts this into practice, organising villagers into committees like Nal Jal Samitis or Pani Samitis to plan, manage, and maintain local water systems. In Gharat, Rajasthan, women-led groups are mobilised to manage the local water scheme, collecting contributions from every household, maintaining accounts, making water security a shared responsibility. This collective action ensures the entire community is invested in long-term water security.
The implications extend well beyond agriculture. Water scarcity intersects with health, education, and gender equity. When women and adolescent girls traverse miles to fetch water, opportunities for income and schooling dwindle. When smallholders abandon their fields due to exhausted wells, urban migration intensifies, overburdening already stressed cities. Conversely, when water systems are secure, villages generate not only food but also stability, improving nutrition, reducing migration, and strengthening local economies. Water management, in essence, is livelihood management.
Collective Responsibility in Sustainable Water Use
India’s water discourse is steeped in apocalyptic narratives – wars over rivers, aquifers collapsing, rivers running dry. Scarcity, when recognized as a collective risk, can spark collective responsibility. Water is not a peripheral resource but the very bedrock of economic life. If the nation can adopt caution not merely in drought years but also in seasons of plenty, it can safeguard both ecology and economy. The choice is unambiguous: extract until exhaustion, or steward until sustainability. The former courts collapse, the latter promises continuity.
(Divyang Waghela, Head of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH), Tata Trusts.)
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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