The political economy of the water-energy nexus in Indian irrigation

Today 61% of irrigated areas in India rely on groundwater, placing supplies under great stress. Sudhanshu Sharma argues this is largely due to policies which incentivise farmers to pump unsustainable amounts of groundwater, designed by politicians targeting farmer votes. He writes that, although solutions to the problem of dwindling groundwater have been proposed and even trialled, they are most likely to fail because they underestimate the political dimension of the problem.