The Downstream Effects of India’s Green Revolution
India extracts more groundwater than any other country worldwide, even more than the U.S. and China combined. In 2024, the country drew nearly 65 trillion gallons of water from its aquifers. A major driver of this demand is agriculture, especially in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana.
The origins of this thirst can be traced back to the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Battling persistent food shortages and dependence on grain imports, Indian planners hoped to attain self-sufficiency in food production. They provided farmers with high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, and also helped mechanize farming tools and equipment.
In Punjab, one of the program’s focus areas, farmers were encouraged to move away from their traditional crops such as pulses, maize, and oilseeds to rice and wheat. As a result, the area under wheat cultivation more than doubled between 1960 and 2023, with production rising more than nine-fold. Rice cultivation saw even steeper increases, with land use increasing nearly 14-fold and an astonishing 58 times more production of the grain.

Rice requires a lot of water — between around 350 and 600 gallons for every pound of grain produced. Farmers initially relied on canals for water, but they soon began drilling tube wells — pipes bored deep underground — to tap into aquifers. The number of tube wells in Punjab increased from 200,000 in 1970 to more than 1.5 million today, said Samanpreet Kaur, a groundwater expert at the Punjab Agricultural University. Eighty-six percent of Punjab’s available water resources are now being used for agriculture and 75 percent for paddy, or rice plants, alone.
According to a report from the Central Ground Water Board, a governmental scientific body, water levels in Punjab are dropping at an average of almost 20 inches per year. The tube wells used to be located at 100 to 150 feet. “Now they have reached up to 400 to 500 feet,” said Sunil Mittal, a soil and groundwater expert at the Central University of Punjab. He explained farmers are now hitting aquifers surrounded by minerals such as uranium, lead, and arsenic, which are entering the water used for both agriculture and household consumption. These heavy metals, along with nitrates in fertilizer runoff, may have contributed to increasing rates of cancers.
Mittal warned that restoring the quality of groundwater will be a difficult task — one that has no strategy in place yet. The contamination has happened over 50 years and it will take just as long to clean it up, he said. “I don’t think any artificial clean up technology will work at such a large level.”


















Reporting on this project between 2023 and 2024 was supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society.
Harsha Vadlamani is an independent photojournalist whose work focuses on rural and indigenous communities across India. His work has also been published by National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Scientific American, GEO and Al Jazeera, among other publications.