Ban Likely On Big Farm Borings To Conserve Water

The government plans to ban all big agricultural borings and drillings in water scarcity areas particularly where the water table has drastically fallen. This is one of the desperate measures the government is taking to conserve the precious limited ground water reserves in the country.

The government, for this purpose, is identifying the regions where the ground water level has considerably gone down.

Two states considered vulnerable in this regard are Gujarat and Rajasthan. Efforts are on to identify other similar areas.

The Union water resources minister C P Thakur said the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) is empowered by Parliament to impose such a ban. It has the authority to issue direction to any person, prohibiting him from exploiting water if there is a threat of ground water level depletion.

 

Thakur said government had already begun work on it and added "we are going to do it".

He referred to a just concluded seminar in this regard. It was attended among others by the Prime Minister himself and now the stage was set to take the plunge, he said, admitting that this might not go well with the farming community.

The implication will be that in areas so identified, no person can go in for big borings or big drillings to pump out water to irrigate the fields.

The affected agriculturists will be called upon to draw water from canals while they can also go for rain water harvesting.

While conservation of ground water is the main concern of the government, it is also of the view that large borings consume a lot of electricity because they are required to tap water from considerably lower depths.

However, ordinary farmers cannot afford big borings and so allowing big farmers to continue with big borings would be a discriminatory act, Thakur pointed out.

However, the government has no intention to interfere with the digging of the tube wells in such areas for drawing drinking water.

These measures, he emphasised, had become imperative in view of the depleting water reserves and the need to meet the water need of a billion strong population which would keep on swelling.