Water wealth: On groundwater exploitation in Punjab

That Punjab is over-extracting groundwater is not news. According to the 2025-26 Dynamic Groundwater Assessment , its groundwater extraction rate was 152% . While interventions reduced the number of ‘over-exploited’ blocks by five over the last two assessments, 72% of its 153 blocks are in the ‘red zone’, the highest among States. The principal consumer is irrigation for rice and wheat, amounting to nearly 25 billion cubic metres a year in the latest estimate. Data also show that the fraction of observation wells with water below 40 metres in the post-monsoon period grew by two percentage points between 2022 and 2025. What began as a strategy to improve food security eventually yielded a concentrated rice-wheat cropping system, in which assured procurement, subsidised electricity and access to groundwater made high-yield varieties, intensive irrigation and fertilizer use and mechanisation less risky than alternative modes of cultivation.