Principles for Supporting a Transition Towards Profitable and Hydrologically Safe Agricultural Landscapes in Northwest India
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International Rice Research Institute
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"Northwest India's rice–wheat belt anchors national food security but is hydrologically overextended. Haryana's stage of groundwater extraction stands at 136.75% (exceeding 200% in districts such as Kurukshetra), with a demand – availability gap exceeding 12,000 million cubic meters (MCM); approximately 45% of the state's groundwater is saline, and around 6.8 lakh ha are waterlogged. In Punjab, water tables are declining at 0.4 – 1.0 m yr⁻¹ and 111–115 of 153 groundwater assessment units are classified as over-exploited. Farm-scale efficiency interventions – direct seeded rice (DSR), alternate wetting and drying (AWD), micro-irrigation, short-duration varieties – deliver real but partial gains and, deployed in isolation, risk rebound effects and spatial displacement of water demand.
Against this backdrop, IRRI and CCSHAU convened a one-day expert roundtable on 11 March 2026 at Hisar under the CGIAR Science Program on Policy Innovations, bringing together 44 participants from state agricultural universities, ICAR institutes, state water and agriculture agencies, and CGIAR centers. The objective was to co-define guiding principles for a transition towards agricultural landscapes that are simultaneously profitable and hydrologically safe, structured around three working themes: (i) water use accounting and supply assessment; (ii) economic viability; and (iii) cropping system design.
The roundtable converged on the following headline conclusions:
1. From farm-scale efficiency to landscape-scale water balance. Interventions must be planned against watershed-level soil–climate–water balances and integrated surface – groundwater assessments, with aquifer-specific extraction thresholds (indicatively maintaining water tables within 3 – 20 m below ground level) set at seasonal, monthly, and annual timescales.
2. Repair the water accounting baseline. Legacy classification rules – e.g., counting land as canal-irrigated if it receives a single canal irrigation – date to the 1970s and systematically misattribute groundwater use. Digitized canal operations, distributed monitoring, and a unified regional water accounting platform are prerequisites for credible policy.
3. Align incentives with hydrology. Economic viability is the binding constraint on diversification. Participants recommended MSP parity and assured procurement for lowwater crops, direct benefit transfers of at least ₹37,000 ha⁻¹ in targeted transitions, water credits and energy-saving rewards (without penalization), parametric climate insurance, and redesign of subsidies towards system-based rather than crop-specific support.
4. Spatially differentiated cropping system design. Haryana's four agro-ecologies and four dominant cropping systems require district- and aquifer-specific recommendations: restricting rice where groundwater is critical (including southern Haryana), promoting short-duration DSR-based sequences (e.g., DSR PB 1509 – mustard–green gram) starting with ~1.5 lakh ha in Panipat and adjoining districts, protecting the cotton belt on salt-affected soils, and applying a ""single cereal per year"" principle.
5. An integrated, co-created plan. Participants endorsed development of a Delta Plan– style integrated framework for Northwest India – linking hydroclimatic scenario assessment, agronomic trade-off analysis, farmer feedback, and science-driven policy bundles – supported by a proposed Centre of Excellence on water use dynamics serving Haryana and Punjab.
A synthesis manuscript consolidating the principles and evidence base discussed at the roundtable was identified as the principal scientific output, alongside continued engagement with the Haryana Water Resources Authority on programmatic design."
Palabras clave
water management, groundwater, grounwater depletion, cropping systems, rice, diversification, direct sowing, sustainable agriculture, agricultural landscape, policies