25-minute listen/watch | 16-minute read
India is the world's largest groundwater-based economy, with more than half its 1.5 billion population depending on agriculture for their livelihoods — making groundwater depletion a critical threat. Researchers are investigating the Atal Bhujal Yojana, a $500 million World Bank–supported national program that takes a community-led, "inside-out" approach to groundwater management. But can village committees manage this resource sustainably and equitably? And what happens when the program is cut short?
Transcript
Mook Bangalore
Water in India is either too much, too little, or way too polluted. So in all three dimensions, it just seems like the water access — and in terms of quality, quantity, suitability — this seems to be a major challenge.
Host
Welcome to Growing Impact, a podcast by the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Penn State. Each episode of Growing Impact explores the projects of Penn State researchers who are solving some of the world's most challenging energy and environmental issues. Each project has been funded by the Institute's seed grant program that grows new research ideas into impactful energy and environmental solutions. I'm your host, Kevin Sliman.
India pumps more groundwater than any other nation — more than China and the United States combined. In a country where rainfall is highly seasonal, and millions depend on water for farming and daily life, groundwater has become a lifeline. But as wells deepen and water tables fall, an urgent question emerges: how can this critical resource be managed sustainably and equitably?
Researchers from Penn State are studying how communities across India are participating in a major national program to protect groundwater. Aiming to understand what's working and how the effort can improve as it expands. Hello, Mook Bangalore, Kaitlyn Spangler, and Praharsh Patel. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Growing Impact.
Mook Bangalore
Hey, Kevin. My name is Mook Bangalore. I am an assistant professor in Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at Penn State, and my research tries to understand how people relate to different types of environmental challenges across the Global South, with a particular interest in water. And in some cases, my research looks at when there is way too much water, in the case of flooding and storms. Other areas are related to when there is too little water — which we'll be talking about today with Praharsh and Kaitlyn — so, mostly around water and environmental challenges.
Praharsh Patel
Hi Kevin, I am currently assistant professor in environmental economics at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. That's called IoT Gandhinagar. But I'm in India now, but I used to be a PhD student at Penn State and affiliated with IEE — that's the Institute of Energy and Environment. And my work has always been all around water, water economics, and policies, mostly trying to understand water scarcity, how it affects the economies, as well as the local livelihood and lives of people in mostly water-scarce regions.
Kaitlyn Spangler
I'm Kaitlyn Spangler, I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education. Generally, my research is centered on community development and engagement, really broadly. A lot of what I think about are mechanisms of agricultural and land-use diversification through farmers and other kind of rural community stakeholders, as well as renewable energy transitions in rural communities.
Host
Let's talk about the big picture. How serious is groundwater depletion in India, and why should people outside of India care about it?
Praharsh Patel
Groundwater depletion is a very critical part to sustain India's economy and livelihood. Why I'm saying that we need to understand the overall water balance of India. India does not get rainfall throughout the year. We mostly get during the monsoon season that starts from somewhere around June and lasting in most parts of India by October or November.
So we don't just need the inter-annual water availability, but even intra-annual, like once there is no rain, you need the water available for sustaining your lives and livelihood around. Groundwater is providing water requirement when there is no other water source available.
And what has happened in the last few years, the groundwater extracted in India is more than how much U.S. and China, the second and third largest groundwater consumers, extract combined. So India is the largest groundwater-based economy in the world, and this has a lot of repercussions. A lot of agriculture depends on it, its sustainability depends on it. More than half of India's population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. If the groundwater is not there, if it's not sustainable, their lives and livelihood are at critical risk.
And what would happen to the 1.5 billion population? We do definitely get a food shortage issue, but also a lot of migration can happen. The migration from rural side to the urban areas, and if the economy is not doing fine in urban areas, there would be plans to like escape out of India as well. So overall, like even while the critical situation is there for India, at global stage, it provides kind of understanding how groundwater plays a very critical role in sustaining development and environment and the overall economic development.
Mook Bangalore
Basically, water in India is either too much, too little, or way too polluted. So in all three dimensions, it just seems like the water access and in terms of quality, quantity, suitability, just seems to be a major challenge for all sectors of the economy and also for people's livelihood. So it really is an issue that touches everybody, and water is life, so it really is a super essential, important aspect of the overall economic and social issues going on in India.
Host
Yeah, let's continue that, actually, Mook. Let's talk about this project. What are you researching? What are you investigating? And why? Why did you choose to do it?
Mook Bangalore
Yeah, so Praharsh, Kaitlyn, and I, along with other colleagues, have been trying to understand different approaches that policymakers can take to try to ameliorate some of the challenges when it comes to groundwater sustainability, or at least make things less bad. So we started to explore one particular program called Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABHY), which is a government program, but this program — which we'll call ABHY for short — looks to catalyze resources and the intuition of communities and have them as central partners in managing their own groundwater resources. And it really builds off of the work done by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues to really think about community resources as being managed by the community themselves. So it really tries to center the people within the communities as leaders and champions in being able to manage their own groundwater resources.
And in terms of policy, this program was also funded in part at least from the World Bank. It was a $500 million program, so it really has a lot of international as well as national relevance and context. And essentially what this program wanted to do was to provide communities a lot of technical support to understand their water balance: What are the inputs of water? What are the outputs of water? What are the uses of water within their communities? And trying to link the interventions that the community was looking for with particular government programs to support those interventions.
So for example, if I'm living in a community that's part of this program in India, I would meet with several other leaders and people on the water committee in my village and we would discuss about what is going on in my community, what are the priorities, and then through this program, try to link to other initiatives to be able to have interventions such as canals or drip irrigation or other types of interventions to be able to address some of those groundwater challenges.
Host
The ABHY, it's described as the largest community-based groundwater management program in the world. What makes it different from traditional water policy or other programs?
Praharsh Patel
There are two broad categories of interventions when we talk about groundwater governance. One is mainly "carrot versus stick" economics policy where you like put in regulations or provide incentives. Another is like this community-based approach. How do I put them is like, I remember one of my high school teachers once like talking about incentives and motivation in life, and gave this example of how to break an egg. While there are two ways of doing it: inside-out or outside-in. I would put like regulation and carrot and stick models mostly like "outside-in" models where if you are pushing that egg inside, that creates mess. Whereas this model of community-based things kind of builds on like something "inside-out" where the community itself is motivated and like wants to do it, and when that kind of thing happens, it kind of gives you a life when an egg is broken from inside.
And that kind of stayed with me for a long time until like I was actually doing my PhD and trying to understand incentives and institutions around groundwater. And I found that different models tried, tested, and mostly failed, whereas like this community-based approach—mostly available with the community and small-scale NGOs—was never tried at a scale that Atal Bhujal Yojana or ABHY tried to do. It was trying to provide institutional support to this more or less informal or local initiatives. And that kind of got us interested — like how the government programs can scale this community-level or community-based approaches.
Host
Recently, the program was foreclosed by the government. So, I know this is new, but what information do you have and can you identify any impacts that the foreclosing of this program, what it might mean?
Praharsh Patel
It was kind even a surprise for many of the field people who are working on the program as a field staff and also the farmers and the community members that government decided that they want to foreclose it. What foreclosure means is like, the tenure of the program was supposed to end in some time end of March in 2026, but they asked all the program-related activities to end and the payments and everything to be done and closed by October 2025. And without clear understanding how this program would be further scaled or not scaled or further floated in or not floated in. So that's the information we currently have. Currently there is a lot of theories floating around why this might have been the case, why the foreclosure could have happened, what were the incentives or intentions for the government, but there is no clear answers to it available with anyone, not even the stakeholders we have interacted with during our fieldwork.
Host
When you say community participation, what does that actually look like on the ground?
Praharsh Patel
When we talk about community participation in water, specifically groundwater management, there are actually a very good hotspots of like self-led programs by the community themselves. One of my papers initially when I started working on water, kind of examined one of such program which was not funded by government but mainly led by the local institutions or religious groups and others to manage their resource locally — mainly the groundwater and water resource. And there the participation was excellent.
But many a times it completely depends on what kind of demographic we are talking to. A lot of heterogeneous groups, if there are a lot of heterogeneous groups there is hard to define a singular community out of them. And the institutions, informal institutions might have conflicting interest or roles to play within the village economies. And there it really becomes a kind of a tricky part.
We found like during working on this fieldwork, I wouldn't say there was a singular definition how we would define a community participation. It ideally envisioned that like there will be a village-level committee, the committee members would come from a different demographics, including half of them being women, many from the disadvantaged group. And they would come together, decide, understand first about their water scarcity challenges from the groundwater perspective and then eventually start looking at the potential solutions and implement them with help from the local community resource persons provided by program.
However, many a times the community themselves were of the opinion that, "Okay, within a village we elected this person called Sarpanch, who is a village head, and we trust the person. And if he is able to take the decision on our own like we don't have a lot of time to come together for all this meetings. We'll just trust them."
Many a times even like village heads were of the opinion that like while most of us know what are the challenges, I'll just be able to answer many of the things and I assume the community would be with me on this aspect. So we really don't understand like how deep this "assumed participation" was actually a participation or not. Are there ways that like they their opinions and perspectives are channeled through the village heads? How much they did it? It's really critical based on the different communities that were involved.
Kaitlyn Spangler
Yeah, and your question, Kevin — I don't know if this was your intention — but it's a really big one and one that has has a sort of burgeoning literature on: What is community? How do we define it? How do we operationalize it in terms of participation and engagement?
And so one of the things that really interested me about this project and this program are those those mandated requirements on who has to be part of these village committees to sort of design this groundwater management plan. So this mandate to include, I think it's at least 30 percent if not 50 percent women and then those from other disadvantaged groups. There's this sort of tension that we see a lot in these kinds of these top-down policies where there's this kind of mandate to include or to have some sort of representation across demographic diversity, however you're operationalizing demographic diversity.
But then the way that that's experienced and actually felt or implemented by each community is going to be different because there are different gender dynamics, different caste dynamics, different social dynamics and relationships. And like Praharsh said, communities have already sort designated leadership structures that these committees are then kind of either plugging into or contending with. And a lot of that depends on how this policy is rolled out across place.
Is there flexibility for this policy to adapt and be nimble to the ways that communities are very different and diverse? Across these interviews, there was such diversity in the ways that people felt they were involved in the committee; some people had no idea what the committee was supposed to do, even if they were technically supposed to be on it. And also that there are people who were sort of outside of the committee designated through the program that had a lot of power and influence over water decision-making.
And so I think there's this question of how we value local expertise, who gets valued as an expert, how we can think about kind of diversifying what kinds of knowledge and expertise is valued. So for example, I think women are in rural communities all across the world are often undervalued in their expertise and knowledge of natural resource management broadly. And so to increase their participation and representation is a sort step forward in theory, but how does that actually translate to people in the community seeing them as valuable members of the water management in their community?
Host
You're studying participation across socioeconomic differences. What does equity matter for groundwater management?
Mook Bangalore
It's a fundamental question because everybody needs water, but not everybody has the same access to water, either in terms of quality or quantity. And in a lot of cases, Praharsh mentioned that, you know, 50 percent of India's economy relies on agriculture, where a lot of times farmers are the ones who require water as an input into their production. But this can be very skewed where possibly larger farmers who have more farmland and more access to technology like pumps can access more water to be able to grow their crops, while other farmers who might have fewer land holdings or fewer resources may just be unable to access that water. And if they do they might actually have to purchase it from the possibly larger farmers who have access to this water.
So there in this case despite water being such an important input into agricultural production, not to mention life itself, just the access to water based upon who has the pumps, who has the technology, who has the land, who has electricity, who has political connections, can really make this sort of a big issue when it comes to equity.
Kaitlyn Spangler
If we think about water as ideally a public good or a common-pool resource, something that everybody has a stake in because everybody needs it, I think it's really hard to talk about that without talking about equity. Because equity is is obviously different than equality, right? Equality is that everybody has an equal share and equity is about everybody has what they need, whether or not that means it's equal or not.
And so I think that inherently takes into account folks who have been historically disadvantaged or marginalized culturally or systematically. And how do we sort of give them additional resources to be able to have a more proportionate seat at the table when it comes to managing things that affect them just as much as they affect other members of their community?
And so I think whenever we talk about kind of managing community resources, I think equity is really at the center of that. And it often involves these really sticky dynamics of addressing not only like money and these sort of tangible resources but also how people relate to each other, feel about each other, perceive each other's knowledge as valuable or not. To sort of document the ways that this program can and cannot address some of these community participation and equity issues is really important in thinking about: Is there a way to design this policy better?
Host
How do you actually measure whether a program like this is working, and are there any signs of either of success or challenges? Can we dive into that a little more?
Praharsh Patel
So if we consider this program to be a kind of a success or failure, it has to be understood basically if the community itself is managing its overall groundwater in sustainable way after the intervention. And which can be understood in a longer term; it cannot be understood within a year or two. Communities are still implementing their solutions or they are still struggling how what were the implementations were supposed to be. So in a longer term if the community is eventually coming to a stable situation where groundwater is not further depleting and they are able to manage their water demand and supply, then we would definitely call this a very good success of a program.
Mook Bangalore
We did some fieldwork in Gujarat and Haryana where we tried to understand experiences in a number of villages in those two states which are in the northwest of India. Seems like a really a situation where the intentions were great, but the implementation of the program seems to have been lacking and had several challenges in trying to link all the different parts of multi-level governance from the international angle to the national government to the state government to the district implementation partners to the communities themselves.
Where this is such a long chain of governance all the way from the top to the bottom that it seems to me that there was at least some sort of either miscommunication or misalignment in incentives which led to a the series of challenges that occurred through the program.
Host
What are you hoping policymakers will learn from this project?
Kaitlyn Spangler
One of the the resounding things that I have learned from this fieldwork is that hopefully there's a way of actually getting them a seat at the table more systematically in rural communities. I think that it is not enough to just mandate a 50 percent participation in these these committees, but that there has to be some other metric or some other assurance of encouraging maybe separate gendered spaces for decision making, you know, separate men and women depending on those kind of local community dynamics. But that the mandate of representation and inclusion is a start, but it is certainly not an end when it comes to meaningfully counteracting some of these gendered social dynamics. So that that would be a additional success of the project is has there been any shifts in the ways that different diverse members of the community show up in this community-based water management.
Mook Bangalore
Another point that I wanted to make is that we kind of just need to be able to have the infrastructure in place to really follow these communities every year, or even multiple times during the year, and really understand what is going on within the season, what is going on from year to year, how are people relating to water, how are they thinking about their futures. And those types of panel data structures within the same village or the same community across time, I think is something that's really, really important for us to be able to try to get a better sense of the impact.
And I feel like there's a lot of potential there to link that type of panel data with a lot of data from satellite imagery to be able to understand the types of conditions that people live in and how different types of interventions, for example through ABHY or other types of water management interventions, can actually have a a tangible effect on the groundwater resource.
Praharsh Patel
It's mostly very undervalued or underestimated like how critical the local leaderships are into community-led conservation efforts, and many a times where even we saw sign of kind of a good implementation and success were like the proactive local leadership taking with the understanding the groundwater depletion challenge first and trying to actually address it and understanding why long-term groundwater sustainability is critical for their community.
So while community-led conservation is a broader term, many a times it assumed that similar kind of practices can be replicated or scaled in many other places. But like actually the essential component or like critical agents over there are the local leaderships and their incentives and their motivation, and I think that should be like very much focused.
Mook Bangalore
And then sorry, one more thing I want to add is just how critical it is when doing this type of research to have people based in the country. And we're extremely grateful to have Praharsh being in India, in IIT Gandhinagar, being close to the villages that are studied, having the understanding of the social-cultural environmental norms, the relationship building and networks that Praharsh and folks in Gandhinagar have had and been building for years. And that is so crucial because I think it also gets you better data.
Praharsh Patel
On the other side of the sea I would like thank Kaitlyn and Mook not being kind of a "parachute scientist" and actually including the voice of the locals as well and actually genuinely making the harder efforts to go through this nitty gritty of local complexities and specifically around the community-based things. It's not very easy thing to understand in a complex societies like India and South Asia. So definitely Penn State has this very local and field-implemented research programs rather than being a parachute science where people are just oblivious about the ground reality.
Host
Thank you very much for having this discussion with me. I appreciate it.
This was Season 6, Episode 4 of Growing Impact. Thanks to Mook Bangalore, Kaitlyn Spangler, and Praharsh Patel for joining me. For a deeper look at their story, visit iee.psu.edu/podcast, where you'll find a video version of this episode, graphics, transcripts, as well as past episodes.
Our communications director is Chris Komlenic, with graphic design and video production by Brenna Buck, marketing and social media by Tori Indivero, and web support by John Stabinger. Join us next time as we continue our exploration of Penn State research and its growing impact. Thanks for listening.
