INDIA’S groundwater crisis is often narrated through familiar images: a failed borewell, a falling water table, a tanker arriving in summer, or a farmer borrowing again to drill deeper. Rishu Garg’s The Borewell Paradox: The Rationality of an Irrational Crisis asks us to look beyond these images. Why do people continue to make choices that, when repeated across a landscape, undermine the resource on which their own prosperity depends? And why do public programmes and professional interventions, designed in the name of water conservation, so often fail to alter that trajectory?
The answer, Garg argues, does not lie in blaming the farmer. The farmer at the centre of this book is not irrational. He reads the sky and soil, responds to uncertain rainfall, calculates the risk of crop failure, and has to meet immediate obligations—a season’s crop, children’s education, household expenses, debt and social commitments. When the survival of loved ones is at stake and no other option is there, taking risk of drilling is perfectly rational. Yet at landscape level and if collectively seen, it means draining future security. That contradiction is the book’s central idea: the “borewell paradox”.
One of the book’s strengths is the way it moves across India’s ecological and social diversity—from the northern hills and western plains to the hard-rock aquifers of central India, the drying tanks of peninsular India and landscapes in the Aravalli and Shivalik regions. These journeys are not travelogue. They reveal how water has historically been embedded in local institutions, cultural practices and systems of restraint. Indigenous arrangements treated access, sharing, preservation and recharge as social questions, not merely engineering ones.
The modern borewell altered this relationship. Mechanised drilling gave individual farmers the power to access a resource that exists beneath property boundaries but does not respect them. Groundwater could increasingly be captured through privately financed infrastructure even though the aquifer remained a shared ecological system. Technology expanded the capacity to extract far faster than institutions expanded the capacity to govern. The result is a peculiar privatisation of access to a common pool resource. Garg uses ideas from behavioural economics and common-resource theory to make this visible. The introductory discussion invokes Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on decision-making, Nassim Nicholas Taleb on narrative and unintended consequences, Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, and Simpson’s Paradox to show how aggregated evidence can conceal uncomfortable realities. Theories such as the prisoner’s dilemma and the Matthew effect are equally useful to read alongside the book: the incentive to defect from collective restraint can be strong, while those with greater capital and deeper drilling capacity often gain an advantage as scarcity intensifies. The theoretical references never overwhelm the narrative; they illuminate choices already visible in farmers’ fields.
A memorable illustration comes from Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. Lined farm ponds built with government support are often celebrated as a water-conservation success. Garg describes how the lining prevents stored water from percolating into the ground, making it more efficiently available to the individual farm. Farmers then use borewells to fill these ponds. The design therefore converts water drawn from a shared aquifer into privately stored water while simultaneously reducing recharge. At the level of one farmer, the intervention makes sense. At the level of the aquifer, it can be damaging. Summer exposes the contradiction: community wells and handpumps decline, tankers arrive and households queue for drinking water while substantial quantities remain stored in private ponds nearby. The programme can still be recorded as a success because expenditure, structures created and beneficiaries reached all look positive in aggregate. This is where the book’s use of Simpson’s Paradox becomes sharp. A programme can perform well according to its own indicators while the larger ecological system deteriorates. Success at the project level may coexist with failure at the landscape level.
For professionals working in development, this is an uncomfortable but necessary warning: outputs are not outcomes, and outcomes do not automatically lead to sustainability. They may present evidence in review meetings and can declare a programme successful. Yet the recommendation may interact very differently with local hydrogeology.
This makes The Borewell Paradox particularly relevant to those of us who work on water, environment and rural development. It asks whether professional systems are genuinely structured to learn from ground realities or are too often structured to validate their own designs. Garg’s argument is clear: technical competence without institutional understanding, local knowledge and ethical responsibility can produce unintended harm. The book therefore asks professionals to move beyond their defined metrics. A pump, pond, dam or borewell must be judged not only by what it does for an individual asset holder but also by what it does to recharge, downstream users, neighbouring farmers, drinking-water security and the wider ecosystem.
(Yogesh Kumar works on participatory development, decentralised governance and water governance. The views expressed are personal)