Reuters

NEW DELHI: When India overtook China as the world’s largest producer of rice this year, the country’s politicians and agriculture lobby marked the moment by praising resilient farmers and innovative government policy.

India has nearly doubled the amount of rice it exported over the past decade, with shipments crossing 20 million metric tons in the latest fiscal year.

But many rice farmers in the country’s agricultural heartlands are in a less celebratory mood. Interviews with growers, government officials and farm scientists, as well as a review of groundwater data, reveal widespread concern that thirsty rice crops are unsustainably draining India’s already-low aquifers, forcing farmers to borrow heavily to drill ever-deeper borewells.

In the rice-basket states of Haryana and Punjab, groundwater was reachable at around 30 feet a decade ago, according to 50 farmers and eight water and agriculture officials.

But drainage has accelerated in the past five years and borewells must now go between 80 and 200 feet, according to the farmers, whose accounts were corroborated with government data and research by Punjab Agricultural University.

“Every year, the borewell has to go deeper,” said Balkar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer in Haryana. “It’s getting too expensive.” At the same time, government subsidies that incentivize rice cultivation discourage farmers from switching to less water-intensive crops, said Uday Chandra, a South Asia politics expert at Georgetown University in Qatar.

The subsidies – some of them a legacy from past decades when India struggled to feed its growing population – include a state-guaranteed minimum price for rice that has climbed by around 70percent over the past decade, as well as heavy power subsidies that encourage extracting water for farm use.

The net effect, said Avinash Kishore at the International Food Policy Research Institute think-tank in Washington, is that one of the world’s most water-stressed countries is paying farmers to consume vast amounts of precious groundwater.

The Indian Ministries of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare and of Water Resources did not respond when presented with Reuters’ findings.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi previously attempted to reform agricultural laws, including measures that would incentivize more private-sector crop purchases. But that raised fears that the government might reduce the quantity of grain it purchases at guaranteed prices, prompting protests by millions of farmers that paralysed the nation five years ago and forced Modi into a rare retreat.

India accounts for 40 percent of the world’s rice exports, so any changes in production will have global implications, Kishore said. In addition, India grows far more rice than it needs to feed its domestic population, which overtook China’s in 2023 to become the world’s largest, at more than 1.4 billion people.

“The sheer volume of rice India produces and exports gives it a pivotal role in global trade,” Kishore said. “But it also raises a question: should the country be growing and selling so much rice?” PUNISHING EXTRACTION COSTS

While farmers in much of India rely on a mix of surface and groundwater irrigation, growers in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, which are the nation’s leading rice producers, typically depend on groundwater. That dependence makes rice farmers in both states particularly vulnerable to climate change, since aquifers aren’t fully recharged when monsoon rains are weak. Even though monsoon rains have been strong for the last two years, farmers have been extracting so much water that aquifers in large parts of Haryana and Punjab are classified by the Indian government as either “over-exploited” or at “critical” levels. The two states extract between 35percent and 57percent more groundwater annually than their aquifers naturally replenish, according to government data for 2024 and 2025. In an attempt to salvage the situation, local authorities in 2023 imposed bans on new borewells in critically exploited zones.

Published Date: January 2, 2026