India is asking one depleting resource to feed its people, fuel its cars and power its technological future: groundwater.

In Bhattu Kalan, a block of Haryana's Fatehabad district, a distillery cleared to draw water for a quarter of a million litres of grain ethanol a day is coming up despite the government itself calling it over-exploited. Fatehabad pumps groundwater at 117% of the rate it replenishes, and yet the plant has received environmental clearance anyway. 

This case study is symptomatic of a larger tendency of the Indian State asking a depleting source to feed its people, fuel its cars and power its digital future, all at once and with exceptional resolve.

This collision would be alarming in a water-abundant world. It is far more consequential as global water reserves approach what a UN Institute in a report has called “bankruptcy.” The UN's 2026 report warns that “long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits,” leaving some water supplies beyond recovery. As the world’s largest groundwater extractor, India sits at the centre of this reckoning

Three Pillars, One Resource

The Indian food supply chain makes or breaks on groundwater. A Jal Shakti National Compilation claims that It waters roughly three in five of the country's irrigated fields and even supplies an overwhelming majority of rural households. And yet one in four of our assessed groundwater units is rated "over-exploited", "critical", or "semi-critical", with the most alarming depletions in the farm belts of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka.

On this already thin ice, India is stacking two more demands.

The first is ethanol. NITI Aayog estimates the water footprint of sugarcane-based ethanol at roughly 3000 litre per litre of ethanol. Politicians and motorists squabble over ethanol's impact on the cars they drive, while the much more concerning impact is on the groundwater of our precariously agrarian country.

The second is the government's simultaneous encouragement of data centres through tax breaks as a part of the Viksit Bharat 2047 AI strategy. Data centres in India consumed roughly 150 billion liters of water in 2025, a figure projected to rise to about 358 billion liters annually by 2030. Yet while a 2026 Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) press release projects the exact electricity demands of AI and large-scale data centres and outlines the infrastructure required to meet them, it provides no comparable projection of water demand or framework for integrating groundwater availability into AI infrastructure planning.

The problem is not that India is pursuing any one of these ambitions. It is that they are being pursued independently despite a shared dependence on groundwater. Without coordination, these ambitions could exhaust the very resources needed to sustain them.

India's Groundwater Efforts

India’s current regulatory attempts are not without merit. In 2020, the Ministry of Jal Shakti launched the Atal Bhujal Yojna (AJY) to improve resource management in 229 groundwater blocks across 7 “water-stressed” states. The program aimed to map and budget water using existing localized governance structures, reporting measurable gains in groundwater levels in 180 out of 229 blocks two years into the pilot program.

But the scheme closed in October 2025. AJY could have mapped stress and persuaded communities to husband water but alas could not compel anyone. We have the tools to measure, with precision, where groundwater extraction is unsustainable, but we do not have the political will to decide how agriculture, industry, drinking water, and new infrastructure will share this already depleting resource.

The cost of getting this wrong will not remain on a spreadsheet. It will become a lost harvest, then a lost livelihood, and finally a harbinger of poverty.

Even if the notion of real poverty is unimaginable for the average person, the consequences of depleting groundwater can be seen in Delhi where a report shows how over-extraction in some areas has led to the land sinking by as much as 17cm in a year.

Governed by a 19th-Century Law

There is a reason that there has been inaction from the government in the face of such damning evidence: Groundwater is still treated as an appurtenance to land under the Indian Easements Act, 1992. "Whoever owns the land may draw what lies beneath." There is no volumetric cap and no licence demanded of the farmer who sinks a borewell. The Model Bill for the Conservation, Protection and Regulation of Groundwater, drafted expressly to replace this colonial regime, has been enacted by only a handful of states. 

The Central Ground Water Authority can restrain industry in notified blocks, but it does not reach the irrigation that accounts for most of what is drawn. So when a distillery is cleared over an over-exploited aquifer, nothing in the law says otherwise.

Answer Is With Us

Much like a Christmas movie, the answer has been within us all along. The fix does not require new machinery. It just requires the political will to balance the greater good with the rat race of technology. India has the Ministry of Jal Shakti's own data on what areas are most affected by the problem of groundwater depletion. It also has government data on where the ethanol and data centres will go. Overlay one on top of the other and you get a map of areas which will be the most severely impacted.

An example of this is the Fatehabad plant, with which this piece opened. This is not a facility in the general area of a stressed zone, but a named water-intensive distillery, part of India's ethanol infrastructure, on a named over-drawn block, both confirmed by government records. And this is just an example, not a fringe case.

Such collision zones could be designated "Groundwater Bankruptcy Districts" and folded into NITI Aayog's Aspirational Districts framework, which already pools schemes, fixes district-level responsibility and tracks progress. Designation would trigger a water budget built on the sustainable yield of the district's own aquifers, drawn from local survey and overseen by panchayats and the district administration. 

The collector would reserve essential supply for drinking and existing livelihoods, monitor extraction, and, crucially, make any new industrial or ethanol demand conditional on demonstrated water capacity. Atal Jal already proved the community-budgeting half of this can work in 180 blocks. The task is to give that logic teeth, and a legal spine

India has the maps, the monitors and the institutions. What it lacks is the wiring between them. Without it, the country risks building its next growth engine on the very resource it is quietly draining - and discovering, one over-exploited block at a time, that it cannot make ethanol, run a data centre or grow a crop on ground that has already given up its water.

(The author is a UC Berkeley graduate and researcher, finishing my LLB in India. I have worked with the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, National Women’s Commission, and as a legal researcher for the Chief Justice of India. The views expressed are personal. He is contacted at sendilprithviraj@gmail.com )