摘要：For millennia, India used surface storage and gravity flow to water crops. During the last
40 years, however, India has witnessed a decline in gravity-flow irrigation and
the rise of a booming 'water-scavenging' irrigation economy through millions
of small, private tubewells. For India, groundwater has become at once critical
and threatened. Climate change will act as a force multiplier; it will enhance
groundwater's criticality for drought-proofing agriculture and simultaneously multiply the
threat to the resource. Groundwater pumping with electricity and diesel also
accounts for an estimated 16–25 million mt of carbon emissions, 4–6% of India's
total. From a climate change point of view, India's groundwater hotspots are
western and peninsular India. These are critical for climate change mitigation
as well as adaptation. To achieve both, India needs to make a transition from
surface storage to 'managed aquifer storage' as the center pin of its water strategy
with proactive demand- and supply-side management components. In doing this,
India needs to learn intelligently from the experience of countries like Australia
and the United States that have long experience in managed aquifer recharge.
