For millennia, India used surface storage and gravity flow to water crops. During the last 40 years, however, India has witnessed a decline in gravity-flow irrigation and the rise of a booming 'water-scavenging' irrigation economy through millions of small, private tubewells. For India, groundwater has become at once critical and threatened. Climate change will act as a force multiplier; it will enhance groundwater's criticality for drought-proofing agriculture and simultaneously multiply the threat to the resource. Groundwater pumping with electricity and diesel also accounts for an estimated 16-25 million mt of carbon emissions, 4-6% of India's total. From a climate change point of view, India's groundwater hotspots are western and peninsular India. These are critical for climate change mitigation as well as adaptation. To achieve both, India needs to make a transition from surface storage to 'managed aquifer storage' as the center pin of its water strategy with proactive demand-and supply-side management components. In doing this, India needs to learn intelligently from the experience of countries like Australia and the United States that have long experience in managed aquifer recharge.

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This article suggests that Asia's groundwater socio-ecology is at an impasse. Rapid growth in groundwater irrigation in South Asia and the North China plains during the period 1970-95 has been the main driver of the agrarian boom in these regions. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China account for the bulk of the world's use of groundwater in agriculture. On the plus side, groundwater development has provided sustenance to agrarian economies and millions of rural livelihoods. On the downside, it has created chronic problems of resource depletion and quality deterioration. While problems of groundwater depletion, pollution and quality deterioration are indeed serious, so are the consequences of the degradation of the resource for those that have come to precariously depend upon groundwater irrigation.Three problems currently afflict groundwater use: depletion due to overdraft; water logging and salinization; and pollution due to agricultural, industrial and other human activity. The pathology of the decline in groundwater socioecology reflects a remarkably similar pattern across regions. The critical issue for Asia now is: what might be done to sustain and revive these groundwater socio-ecologies vital to the region's economy? This article reviews a variety of technoinstitutional approaches. However, transposing lessons from the industrialized world uncritically in the Asian context may not work. A more nuanced understanding of the peculiarities of Asia's groundwater socio-ecology is needed.

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