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Paper short abstract:

Millions of smallholder farmers in rainfed India have transformed their livelihoods with the adoption of groundwater irrigation since the 1990s, accelerated by conditions of economic liberalisation. This paper examines the political economy of how this occurred and its long term consequences.

Paper long abstract:

From the 1970s onwards, groundwater irrigation in India has fundamentally reconfigured the socio-ecological fabric of the country. In creating more absolute irrigated area in five decades than incumbent technologies managed in 150 years, proponents have referred to it as a “groundwater revolution”. In this paper, I conducted 84 interviews and 151 household surveys at the village level in south Indian state of Telangana, to examine how groundwater irrigation has changed the political economy of agricultural livelihoods. In particular, I examine the role of private sector intermediaries in local irrigation firms and the market driven process of groundwater intensification in India and Telangana in the liberalisation era since the 1990s. Distinct from the original Green Revolution in the 1960s in India, the transformation of millions of subsistence smallholder farmers in rainfed and semi-arid areas like Telangana through markets and liberalisation formed a new epoch in Indian agriculture I refer to as the “Late Green Revolution” (LGR). This paper lays bare the consequences of technological fixes to the lives of the millions of smallholder farmers in an already environmentally unsuitable and hostile agricultural landscape such as Telangana. This paper finds that groundwater irrigation was widely adopted by the poorest farmers but with disastrous outcomes: competitive zero-sum drilling and rise in well densities, well failure rates of 89% and depletion of aquifers, chronic indebtedness and the eventual abandonment of the technology. This paper shows that groundwater irrigation has propelled farmers deeper into agrarian crisis, revealing the “groundwater revolution” as a mirage.