How groundwater extraction for export crops is draining Bundelkhand's poorest villages

In Itwa gram panchayat in Chitrakoot, one of the seven Bundelkhand districts of Uttar Pradesh, summer arrives like a slow verdict. Tankers hired to deliver water to the village pause briefly near the Dalit basti where the Chamar community lives. They do not stay. The vehicles move on, heading to the upper-caste settlements of Brahmins and Thakurs.

Rama Kumari, a resident of the basti, has watched this for years. "We are not allowed to fill water from the hand pumps and borewells that are all outside our basti or even approach the tankers. Where should we go then?" she asks. Kamta Kumar, another resident, describes the reality with chilling plainness: "Water is provided only to the Brahmins and people fight with us when we approach the hand pump. There are two people always standing with a lathi ready to hit in case any of us approach their hand pump." These accounts were reported by The Wire in June 2019 and the conditions they describe have not disappeared since.

This is not just a drought story. It is a story about what India chooses to drain, what it chooses to export, and who pays the price at the bottom.

The geology of thirst

Bundelkhand straddles Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh across 14 districts: Jhansi, Jalaun, Lalitpur, Mahoba, Hamirpur, Banda, and Chitrakoot in UP; and Datia, Tikamgarh, Chhatarpur, Panna, Damoh, Sagar, and a part of Sagar division in MP. The region sits on hard rock terrain, mostly granite, basalt, and fractured sandstone, which limits how much rainfall can seep below the surface. According to the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), nearly 85 per cent of annual precipitation in parts of Bundelkhand runs off as surface water, leaving only about 15 per cent to recharge aquifers below. When those aquifers are extracted faster than they refill, the water table drops, borewells go dry, and hand pumps begin to pull air instead of water.

Between 2006 and 2016, 60 per cent of Bundelkhand's wells recorded a fall in groundwater by 4 metres. Mahoba, Chitrakoot, Lalitpur, and Hamirpur have seen groundwater extraction exceed 70 per cent of annual recharge rates, which puts them at the edge of the CGWB's stress classification. In Panna, a November 2021 CGWB monitoring report found the water level in wells had dipped by as much as 72 per cent compared to the decadal mean. The CGWB's Dynamic Groundwater Assessment for 2024 classifies three Bundelkhand districts as "critical" and one as "semi-critical." A classification is not a reassurance. It is a category for a problem already in progress.

The districts flagged as critical are the ones where farmers have drilled borewell after borewell, where hand pumps go dry by March, where Dalit women walk four to six kilometres to find water before sunrise.

Exporting water, denying water

The connection between export agriculture and Bundelkhand's thinning aquifers is not straightforward, but it is real, and policymakers have deliberately avoided making it.

India is the largest extractor of groundwater in the world. The CGWB's 2022 assessment placed India's annual groundwater extraction at 239.16 billion cubic metres (BCM). Agriculture accounts for 87 per cent of that extraction, approximately 208 BCM every year, most of it drawn by subsidised pumps powered by cheap or free electricity. The CGWB's 2024 report shows the figure has risen again to 245.64 BCM.

India simultaneously exports this water, invisibly, embedded in the crops it ships abroad. The concept is called virtual water: the water used to grow a crop is effectively exported when the crop leaves the country. A study published in Nature Communications by researchers Shoumitro Chatterjee, Rohit Lamba, and Esha D. Zaveri found that India's agricultural policies drive it to export approximately 25 billion cubic metres of virtual water every year. The study argues that output subsidies for wheat and rice, the minimum support price regime, have pushed farmers to grow the most water-intensive crops in the most water-scarce geographies, because those are the crops the government guarantees to buy.

The numbers are stark. One kilogram of rice requires an average of 2,800 litres of water. One kilogram of wheat requires roughly 1,654 litres. In 2014-15 alone, India exported 37.1 lakh tonnes of basmati rice, consuming 10 trillion litres of water in the process. A 2023-24 estimate by Sathguru Management Consultants calculated the virtual water trade from rice exports alone at 40.87 BCM. That figure represents nearly 17 per cent of India's entire annual groundwater extraction for all uses.

India accounts for 12 per cent of global groundwater depletion associated with international food trade. In a country that holds 18 per cent of the world's population but only 4 per cent of its freshwater, this arithmetic has consequences that fall most heavily on those who never see the export earnings.

Bundelkhand grows wheat extensively. The region's farmers, particularly those with larger landholdings, have shifted toward water-intensive cultivation precisely because the MSP system makes wheat financially safer than drought-tolerant millets or sorghum. Researchers note that "groundwater exploitation has furthered with the cultivation of water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton, leading to greater dependence on borewells and hand pumps." Those borewells belong almost entirely to upper-caste farmers with land and capital. The hand pumps, installed at the edge of Dalit bastis, are what remain for everyone else.

Caste at the Well

The water crisis in Bundelkhand is not experienced equally. It is structured by caste, and that structure is not incidental to the problem. It is the mechanism by which the problem is concentrated among the most vulnerable.

A study examining water access across Indian villages found that Dalits face differential and severe deprivation linked to physical segregation of hamlets, caste ideas of purity and pollution, and active exclusion from public water structures. National data shows that Dalits were denied access to water sources in 48.4 per cent of villages because of segregation and untouchability practices, and more than 20 per cent of Dalits do not have access to safe drinking water.

In Bundelkhand specifically, the pattern is documented and recurring. In Adhiyara village, field reports describe queues at water tanks where upper-caste women are served first and Dalit women wait until they have finished. In Damoh district in MP, a Dalit boy drowned in an uncovered well in 2016 because he was denied access to the school hand pump by upper-caste teachers. His father, Bedi Lal, asked the Janpad Panchayat CEO: "Should we remain thirsty because we are untouchables?"

The structural irony is visible at the village level. Upper-caste farming households own the borewells that drain the aquifer to grow wheat and cotton for market sale. Dalit households, owning little to no land, have no borewells. They depend on government hand pumps, which draw from the same depleted water table, and frequently go dry by the time April arrives. As one journalist noted from fieldwork in the region, "upper-caste farmers have their own borewells and don't need hand pumps, forcing lower caste members to draw from wells, which are uncovered and often carry water-borne diseases."

This is the water economy of Bundelkhand: the people doing the extraction benefit from it; the people excluded from extraction bear its costs.

The policy that papers over the crisis

The government's answer to rural water inequality has been the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), launched in August 2019 with the stated goal of providing functional household tap connections to every rural family by 2024. The mission has provided tap connections to over 15 crore rural households as of early 2025. In Bundelkhand, the UP government set a December 2025 deadline to complete remaining connections, citing 90 per cent completion in most phases.

The problem is the gap between connection and function. A 2024 government-commissioned Functionality Assessment Survey found that only 83 per cent of households with tap connections actually received water through those taps at least once in the previous seven days. A tap connected to an empty source does not solve a water crisis. In regions where the aquifer itself is depleting, surface-level infrastructure cannot substitute for the resource below.

The scheduled tribe-dominated areas show 44 per cent of rural households still lack tap water connections, according to data from FII's analysis of Jal Jeevan Mission coverage. The NITI Aayog warned in its Composite Water Management Index that 40 per cent of India's population will have no access to drinking water by 2030 if present trends continue. Bundelkhand, with its hard rock geology, low recharge rates, and rising extraction for commercial agriculture, sits at the sharper end of that projection.

The mission has also not addressed the core problem of groundwater governance. It builds pipes. It does not regulate borewells. It does not tie crop support prices to water availability. It does not prohibit the cultivation of water-intensive crops in over-extracted blocks. The incentive to extract remains untouched.

The argument that cannot be delayed

The crisis in Bundelkhand's groundwater is simultaneously a climate justice failure, an agrarian policy failure, and a caste violence problem. All three have to be named together.

India's MSP regime, its electricity subsidies for agricultural pumping, and its rice export ambitions form a coherent policy architecture that makes it rational for farmers with access to land and capital to extract as much groundwater as possible. The Nature Communications study by Chatterjee, Lamba, and Zaveri describes this as "well-intentioned but poorly designed." The result is that India exports 25 BCM of virtual water annually while 12 per cent of global groundwater depletion linked to food trade originates in India, a country already classified as "extremely high-water stress" by the World Resources Institute's Aqueduct Atlas.

At the base of this system, in Bundelkhand's Dalit bastis, a woman walks to a hand pump before dawn to find it dry, then walks to the next one, then the next. She is not in the export statistics. She has no land in the national agricultural subsidy architecture. She does not benefit from MSP wheat procurement. She only absorbs the cost of its water.

The phrase "virtual water export" sounds technical and distant. In Chitrakoot's Itwa panchayat, it has a face. It is Rama Kumari's face, watching a water tanker pass her door.

(The author is an ICSSR Fellow at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj)

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK