“Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers — China, India, and the US. More than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling,” Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has said. In India, water shortages are particularly serious simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India’s water situation, Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled are lowering water tables in most parts of the country.

“In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters per year. In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere and falling water tables have dried up 95 per cent of the wells owned by small farmers reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade,” Brown has noted. “As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 meters in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in,” Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station in Gujarat, said of India’s water situation.

The situation over water is equally serious in Pakistan whose population is growing by three millions a year and a country that is mining underground water. “In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from one to nearly two meters a year,” Brown has said in his latest finding.

In the province of Balochistan, water tables around Quetta are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the WWF and a participant in a study of Pakistan’s water situation, said in 2001 that within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues.