India’s per capita use of water will increase from 99 litres per day now to 167 litres per day by 2050.
The per capita consumption of water in the United States, on the contrary, will reduce from 587 litres to 484 litres per day in 2050.
Developing countries in Asia and Africa use 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the available water for agriculture and between five per cent and 12 per cent of it for industrial use, which is inefficient use of water in agriculture.
The rains in India, even when they are torrential the way they were recently, are not tapped efficiently, partly for lack of infrastructure like reservoirs and partly because of a lack of awareness of rain harvesting techniques. India has 182 million hectares of cultivable land, but crops only grow across 140 million hectares of it, of which a mere 62 million hectares comprise irrigated land. Irrigation can be extended to the rest of the rain-fed areas too, by tapping surface water across 76 million hectares of land and ground water for the remaining 64 million hectares.
Effectively though, only 76 million hectares are likely to get irrigation by then, of which as much as 60 million hectares will be tapping into ground water. Ground water is expected to be a source of irrigation for another 10 million hectares of agricultural land by 2050.