Tech crucial to stave off water, agri crises
Karnataka faces a water crisis by the end of February. The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre says that the state’s major reservoirs, which can hold water up to 895 thousand million cubic feet (tmcft), now have only 394 tmcft; they had 668 tmcft at the same time last year. Similarly, the 114-tmcft Cauvery Basin reservoirs have just 52 tmcft against 83 tmcft a year ago. Officials in the revenue department, under which the disaster management wing functions, say the state may not receive adequate showers to fill its reservoirs in the coming months.
Anticipating such a situation, farmers have been asked not to cultivate water-intensive crops and citizens have been asked to avoid wasting water and to conserve water. Several states have faced similar situations. The reason is a heavy dependence on rains. Even when technology is available to help with the situation, it is unfortunately largely ignored; so we continue to look at the sky and blame ‘rain gods’ for the predicament.
While much of the impacts of climate change—globally and locally—are attributed to environmental changes caused by human activities, should not human intervention also be directed towards using technology to tide over adverse anthropogenic factors? Desalination of seawater (an abundant resource), extraction of water from atmospheric moisture, adoption of hydroponics to minimise water consumption in agriculture, drying of agricultural produce for longer shelf lives are technologies that are already available. We need to adopt them to modernise agricultural techniques so that water crises do not impact our crucial food bowls and people’s lives.
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research recognises three central, four deemed and 64 state agricultural universities. There are various other institutes engaged in sustainable agricultural development and atmospheric science research. These need to be interlinked and streamlined to channelise research efforts towards the singular objective of taking agriculture to a higher, technology-intensive level. They need to explore and disseminate information on ways to achieve maximum yields with minimum water consumption without compromising on crop quality.
Simultaneously, innovative water-generating methods need to be employed for group sustenance. The need of the hour is a technological revolution for further modernising agriculture and for generating and conserving water.