India Digs Deeper, but Wells Are Drying Up, and a Farming Crisis Looms

This problem extends further than just the Indian Subcontinent. Globally, important water tables are falling and mountain winter snow packs are deminishing. And these water supplies are the life blood for millions and millions of people.  The future is coming upon us like a train but few seem to hear the whistle and the roar of it yet.

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TEJA KA BAS, India – Bhanwar Lal Yadav, once a cultivator of cucumber and wheat, has all but given up growing food. No more suffering through drought and the scourge of antelope that would destroy what little would survive on his fields.

Today he has reinvented himself as a vendor of what counts here as the most precious of commodities: the water under his land.

Each year he bores ever deeper. His well now reaches 130 feet down. Four times a day he starts up his electric pumps. The water that gurgles up, he sells to the local government — 13,000 gallons a day. What is left, he sells to thirsty neighbors. He reaps handsomely, and he plans to continue for as long as it lasts.

“However long it runs, it runs,” he said. “We know we will all be ultimately doomed.”

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– this article is from the NY Times.  They require you to register to read their stuff but registration is free and easy.

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