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Elusive Water – II
Punjab’s agri prospects recede...
...as groundwater level declines
Jangveer Singh
Tribune News Service

Patiala/Sangrur/Bathinda, June 12
Sohanjit is a harried man. In between giving instructions to his team, he is continuously taking calls and also making notes in a pocket diary. The owner of two deep borewell digging rigs, he is pursuing the trade of his father, not with the same enthusiasm though.

“My father invariably struck sweet water,” says 35-year-old Sohanjit, recollecting his childhood memories when he used to accompany his father on a rig. “My strikes are usually alkaline,” he says, admitting the pursuit for water is fast turning out to be a losing battle in Punjab. Sohanjit, who has been working on the rigging machines since the last 15 years, says he usually found good quality water at around 200 feet about five years ago. “I have dug 30 borewells in the last two months and have been unable to find adequate quality water at less than 280 feet,” he says, adding in some cases he has had to dig as deep as 600 feet.

There are around 30 rigging machines running continuously in the Shambhu-Ghanaur belt in Patiala, with rigs like Sohanjit’s installing a borewell in three to four days. In Sangrur, where deep borewells have been dug earlier, farmers are installing longer pipes in their old borewells to go deeper in search for water. In most of these places, water at 60 feet is not fit for irrigation. Similarly, borewells installed at 150 feet simply dry up in the summer.

In Bathinda, Subhash Kumar of Singla Traders says around 300 boring rigs are working round the clock in the nearby areas and that many more are working in the worst-affected Rampura, Phul and Maur blocks. At Mandikalan village in Rampura, as many as 400 borewells have been replaced with new ones in the last few years, with the region witnessing a one-and-a-half metre drop in water table, according to Bathinda Chief Agriculture Officer PS Sandhu. Sandhu says farmers have been indiscriminate in digging borewells even in areas not known for paddy cultivation, buoyed as they were by the free power concession for the agriculture sector that has continued since more than three years now.

The Agriculture department, which had installed metres in 1,092 observation wells in Punjab, says around 600 of these wells have dried up. The rate of fall in water table in central Punjab doubled after the first 12 years (starting 1974) and has tripled during the last eight years.

Last year in central Punjab, the water level showed a decline of as much as 2.6 metres from June to September in Patiala, followed by Sangrur, Barnala and Moga, which have all experienced a drop of 1.6 metres. The readings for the period September 2009 to June 2010 are due in July but Agriculture department Director Balwinder Singh Sidhu is not very optimistic. “We could see a drop of even four metres in some places this year because of scant winter rain,” he added.

The state picture is also turning bleak. Overexploited blocks in the state have increased to 115 out of 140 presently. The remaining 24 blocks represent those areas where water is saline or otherwise of poor quality. There were only 53 overexploited blocks till 1984.

(To be concluded)