Norman Borlaug's India

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have already discussed the negative impact of Noble Prize winning Norman Borlaug's misguided attempt to feed the worlds hungry here and here. Well now we have a new one:

India's thirst is making us all wet

ONE nation's thirst for groundwater is having an
impact on global sea levels. Satellite measurements show that northern
India is sucking some 54 trillion litres of water out of the ground
every year. This is threatening a major water crisis and adding to
global sea level rise.

Virendra
Tiwari from the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad,
India, and colleagues used gravity data from the GRACE satellite to
monitor the loss of continental mass around the world since 2002.
Regions where water is being removed from the ground have less mass and
therefore exert a smaller gravitational pull on the satellite.

The
data revealed that groundwater under northern India and its
surroundings is being extracted exceptionally fast. Tiwari and
colleagues calculate that between 2002 and 2008 an average of 54 cubic
kilometres - enough to fill more than 21 million Olympic swimming pools
- was lost every year. Boreholes in the region show the water table is
dropping by around 10 centimetres a year (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2009gl039401).

Agriculture
is the primary culprit, says John Wahr of the University of Colorado at
Boulder. If the trend isn't reversed soon, the 600 million people
living in the region could face severe water shortages in the next few
years.

The
"lost" water doesn't just disappear, though. Most of it runs into the
oceans. The team calculates that it could be pushing up global sea
levels by as much as 0.16 millimetres each year. That's 5 per cent of
total sea level rise.

Of course the sea level rise is nothing compared to the human suffering that will result when the groundwater is gone.  Borlaug's heart was in the right place but he simply postponed the inevitable.