Invisible employer

How strange—and alarming—to think that an invisible employer is vanishing beneath our feet. Groundwater, long treat-ed as a private convenience, has quietly underpinned millions of days of casual farm work across India. As watertables fall, that “employer” is showing up less at the village gate: fewer transplanting seasons, shorter harvests and less de-mand for daily wage labour. The result is not only ecological stress but a mounting labour-market shock for the most precarious rural workers. Start with the scale. The Central Ground Water Board’s (CGWB’s) “Dynamic Ground Water Resources of India 2024” assessment reports India’s annual groundwater recharge at roughly 448.5 billion cubic metres (BCM), with an annual ex-tractable resource of 407.8 BCM and estimated annual extraction of nearly 247.2 BCM. Those national aggregates can lull policymakers into complacency. The truth is local and sharp: in the CGWB’s 2023 block-level accounting, 736 of some 6,553 assessment units (about 11 per cent) were classified as “over-exploited”—extracting more water than recharges—with many more labelled “critical” or “semi-critical.”

Why does that matter for labour? Two linked facts do the damage. One, casual agricultural labour is a major source of rural work. As per Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s “Periodic Labour Force Survey” for 2022-23, roughly one in four rural workers are casual—people hired day to day during peak cropping operations. Two, groundwater-fed irrigation historically expanded cropping intensity and the seasonal calendar that generates those jobs. When wells go dry or pumping costs spike, farmers cut irrigation, shift to less labour-intensive crops, or reduce cropped area. That immediate-ly reduces hiring days for casual workers and prompts out-migration or prolonged underemployment.

Field and academic evidence confirms the mechanism. Local case studies—most notably recent assessments in Pu-rulia and other drought-prone districts—document sharp declines in casual agricultural employment following reduced groundwater access. These include household-survey-based analyses published in the Springer Nature journal Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change in 2024, as well as groundwater irrigation studies using long-run records from 1996 to 2020, published in 2023 in Environmental Science and Pollution Research. Comparable, evidence-based findings of water-driven contractions in farm labour demand have also been reported from Marathwada (Beed, Latur and Dharashiv), Vidarbha (Dongargaon), and parts of Bundelkhand (Jhansi-area watersheds). At the national level, broader analyses emphasise …

This article was originally published in the January 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth