The condition of groundwater in India is becoming increasingly serious day by day, and this crisis has been neglected for many decades.

The National Green Tribunal expressed strong displeasure in January 2026 over the report submitted by the Central Ground Water Authority. The report lacked important information that had been sought, it avoided explaining what criteria are used to grant permissions for development projects in groundwater-stressed areas, and the overall tone of the document was vague and incomplete. When the tribunal raised questions about this, the authority stated that the task of setting criteria falls under the jurisdiction of state-level regulatory bodies.

But the tribunal immediately posed the next question when most states have not even established such bodies, how exactly is the permission process being implemented? Whether audit reports for commercial usage are published, whether no-objection certificates are issued from time to time, how much environmental penalty has been imposed on those who violate the rules the authority had no answers to any of these questions. This situation is not merely administrative negligence but a deep gap in the management of one of the country’s most fundamental natural resources.

According to the 2024 report of the Central Ground Water Board, the average rate of groundwater extraction in India has reached 60.47 percent, which is higher than 59.26 percent in 2023. In 2024 alone, 245.64 billion cubic meters of groundwater was extracted. Of this, 87 percent, that is 213.29 billion cubic meters, was consumed by the agricultural sector alone, domestic use accounts for 11 percent and industrial use for a mere two percent. Out of 6,746 assessment units in the country, 751 units meaning more than 11 percent have been classified as “over-exploited,” meaning that in those areas, groundwater extraction exceeds annual recharge. In Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli, extraction is over 100 percent, meaning more water is being drawn from the ground than nature replenishes. This picture is not merely alarming but extremely dangerous for future generations.

The quantity of groundwater is declining, that is true, but the quality of groundwater is also deteriorating rapidly. While citing the 2024 Annual Groundwater Quality Report, the NGT pointed out that in Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, and western Uttar Pradesh, the levels of salinity, fluoride, and heavy metals in groundwater are increasing.

Even more shocking is the presence of uranium in India’s groundwater. In 2019-20, a nationwide survey was conducted for the first time in which 14,377 samples were tested. It was found that in some places, the uranium content in water is as much as 96 times higher than the prescribed limit. The World Health Organization has set the limit of uranium in drinking water at 30 micrograms per liter. In Punjab alone, 24.2 percent of wells were found to have uranium levels exceeding this limit, in Haryana 19.6 percent, in Delhi 11.7 percent, and in Telangana 10.1 percent of wells face this alarming situation. The Bureau of Indian Standards has still not established any national standard for uranium in drinking water, which is a symbol of the neglect toward the seriousness of this problem. 151 districts across 18 states are partially affected by this high uranium concentration, and millions of people are unknowingly drinking this contaminated water.

The most painful and human face of this entire water crisis is that of women and girls. According to United Nations statistics, in water-stressed areas, 80 percent of the responsibility of fetching water falls on women. Carrying pots on their heads, buckets and drums in their hands, these women spend approximately 250 million hours every day solely in procuring water. This is the time that could have been invested in their education, livelihood, and health. The scarcity of water directly wounds the education of girls. From sanitation to safe childbirth, 27 percent of women in the world are at health risk due to insufficient water. The irony is that the women who have the most direct experience of water management have less than 17 percent participation in decision-making. The labor is women’s, but the rights and policies remain in men’s hands this inequality persists even today.

Now against this backdrop, a new, comparatively invisible but rapidly intensifying water crisis is emerging one connected to Artificial Intelligence, or AI. We usually see AI as a mobile app, chatbot, or image-generating tool, and make the mistake of considering it virtual. But the machinery behind these services is extremely physical data centers filled with thousands of servers, where chips with billions of transistors work round the clock. These chips consume enormous electricity while running AI models and generate heat in equal proportion. If this heat is not controlled, the chip gets damaged and the entire system can collapse. That is why large amounts of water are needed to keep these data centers constantly cool. A medium-sized data center can use approximately 110 million gallons of water per year solely for cooling, which is roughly equal to the annual water needs of nearly one thousand households. Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day meaning the annual water usage of a single center can be equivalent to that of a small town with a population of ten thousand to fifty thousand. In developed countries, the growth in the number of data centers in just a few years has been so rapid that local administrations are having to allocate more water to industries and digital infrastructure than to domestic use.

The water footprint of AI what is called the water footprint is not limited only to running models in data centers. It begins from the very manufacturing of the semiconductor chips on which AI models run. The production and cleaning of these chips requires extremely pure water, and this purification process itself is immensely water-consuming. A single chip, which eventually gets installed in a data center, has already consumed thousands of gallons of water during its manufacturing journey. After that, the same chip demands more water for cooling while running AI models. The energy requirements of AI make this water equation even more complex.

In many parts of the world, electricity still depends on coal and gas-based thermal power plants, which consume enormous amounts of water. According to the World Energy Outlook and World Water Development reports, in many countries including the United States, China, and France, 30 to 40 percent of the total water share goes solely into energy production. After cooling, some water returns, but in a heated state, which affects the ecological systems of local rivers and lakes. The remaining water exits the usage cycle as vapor. This means that in addition to the water directly used in data centers, there is a large invisible water footprint hidden behind the electricity they consume.

Source: Global Research