Research Projects

The production, consumption, and security of food, energy, and water (FEW) are inextricably linked. The issue of severe groundwater depletion in northwestern India is important and urgent with many efforts directed at addressing it. The inclusion of irrigation abstractions is crucial in making meaningful policy recommendations about groundwater table depletion. Our understanding of estimation of groundwater depletion in India at state and regional scales has improved in recent years. However, the estimation of groundwater extraction at finer scales – farm and village level, remains riddled with uncertainty. The proposed work will fill this gap by collecting field level data on duration and rate of pumping over two growing seasons. Hydroeconomic models have been found to be very useful in making policy recommendations in reducing water consumption by explicitly modelling the economic benefits and costs of water in different systems. The application of hydroeconomic models, previously limited to arid areas with irrigation, has recently been expanded to regions with mixed regimes of rainfall and supplemental irrigation. This proposal aims to These existing models in the literature can be further enhanced by (i) monitoring and modelling the farm level agricultural draft and (ii) incorporating a dynamic groundwater response module into the model. We outline a methodology to develop a framework, namely regional hydroeconomic optimization model – groundwater (RHEO-GW), which links the following four modules at a regional scale: (i) bio-physical crop growth simulation module, irrigation optimization module, dynamic groundwater response module, and resource optimization module. Such a proposed model would be a valuable tool in providing policy recommendations for water and energy savings.