Since 1995, more than 270,000 farmers have committed suicide in India. Of these, it’s estimated that nearly 59,300 suicides since the 1980s were attributable to climate change.
What these grim figures tell us is that man-made factors that affect the environment have already laid down a devastating death toll. India’s farmer suicide crisis is an unparalleled disaster, as millions of farmers stake everything they own on a successful crop. When their crops fail, their dreams fail with them. And the worst is yet to come.
India’s groundwater reserves are depleting rapidly. For when the rains fail, as they so often do, farmers turn to the ground and its borewells for their water supply. Since the 1960s and the Green Revolution, farmers have gotten most of their water for irrigation from borewells. Across India, borewells are the lifeline of millions of farmers. But all borewells rely on a groundwater table – one that we are depleting faster than it can replenish.
In Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, groundwater is consumed faster than it is replenished. In many parts of the country, groundwater levels have gotten so low that farmers build wells more than ten metres deep – a situation that necessitates additional and costly equipment. Rainwater contributes most of the replenishment of the water table, but in most of the country, it is not harvested. In many places, it is not even allowed to seep back into the ground.
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