Groundwater: the assessment, the four grades and who may regulate a well

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Groundwater and water conservation

India pumps more groundwater than any other country, about a quarter of the world's draw; it waters over 60 per cent of irrigated land and most rural drinking water. The Central Ground Water Board and the States assess it yearly unit by unit, block, taluk or mandal, and grade each by its stage of extraction, the draw as a share of what recharges: safe below 70 per cent, semi critical to 90, critical to 100 and over exploited beyond it, where more is pumped than the rain puts back. About one unit in nine is over exploited, from Punjab through Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and the national stage is around 60 per cent. Regulation is weak because the law is old: whoever owns the land owns the water under it, and water is a State subject, so the Centre acts only through the Central Ground Water Authority.

• The Dynamic Ground Water Resources Assessment: the Board with the States, yearly since 2022; recharge, extractable resource and extraction for each unit, with irrigation taking almost nine tenths of what is drawn. The assessment subject carries the latest figures; the grades in the figure are what a question tests.
• Ownership and the law: the Indian Easements Act, 1882 (Section 7) attaches the right to water under land to the land itself, so a well is private property, and water sits in the State List (Entry 17), so the Centre cannot legislate for it. The Central Ground Water Authority, constituted in 1997 under Section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 on the Supreme Court's direction, notifies over exploited areas and clears industrial and infrastructure use through no objection certificates; the Model Bill for the Conservation, Protection, Regulation and Management of Groundwater, 2017 is the template States are asked to enact, and about twenty have some law.
• Why the draw is high: free or flat rate farm power, paddy in a dry region, and procurement at the minimum support price, which the Punjab paddy subject sets out; the Tamil Nadu and Delhi rules that make rainwater harvesting compulsory in buildings, and Tamil Nadu's from 2003, are the demand side answers.
• The schemes: Atal Bhujal Yojana, from 2019 with World Bank money in seven States, made the gram panchayat write a water budget and a security plan and closed in 2025 as a completed pilot; Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain, from 2021, and Jal Sanchay Jan Bhagidari, from 2024 and merged with it in 2026, build recharge structures; the National Aquifer Mapping programme maps the aquifers that all of this depends on; source sustainability is a condition of the Jal Jeevan Mission tap.
• The traditional systems a question names: johads in Rajasthan, tankas and kunds in the desert, baolis and stepwells, the eris of Tamil Nadu, the bamboo drip of Meghalaya, the zings of Ladakh, the ahar pyne of south Bihar, the kuhls of Himachal and the khadin of Jaisalmer, each a way of holding rain where it falls.

Mains: Groundwater is a commons drawn as private property: the well is the farmer's, the aquifer is everyone's, and until the law separates the two, pricing power and paying farmers to grow something other than paddy will do more than any authority's notification.

See also: Dynamic Ground Water Resources Assessment · Atal Bhujal Yojana · Jal Sanchay Jan Bhagidari · Jal Jeevan Mission 2.0 · Punjab's paddy and its groundwater · Watershed development · How a river is judged polluted: the classes, the standards and the sewage gap