Water footprints and social well-being: a case study of India

Abstract

The primary motive of this thesis is to analyze the water footprints of agriculture production in India broadly. The issues related to freshwater availability, use, and management have received profound recognition in the global context. The increasing agricultural water use is the major concern for the investigation based on the growing effects of economic globalization, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and expansion of irrigated agriculture. The intensive agricultural practices around the world resulted in severe environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity, reduced soil quality, and surface and groundwater pollution. Water resources are under threat from water scarcity, water pollution, water conflicts, and climate change. The policymakers are more concerned regarding the role of agriculture in economic development. Chapter 1 discusses a general introduction of the thesis. This chapter discusses the background of the study, followed by the three theoretical frameworks, i.e., Water Footprints, Virtual Water, and Sustainability Assessment. Chapter 2 discusses the relevant literature on the assessment of Water Footprints, Virtual Water flows, and Sustainability of crops production. This chapter highlights the impacts of agriculture production and its increasing pressure on water resources, both global and Indian perspectives. Chapter 3 examines the determinants of agricultural water use, cultivable land use, and primary crops production across five agro-climatic zones in India over the period 1991- 2019. This study classifies the Indian states into five agro-climatic zones, namely Northern, Western, Southern, Eastern, and Northeastern, to measure agricultural water use for primary crops production in India. The study follows the theoretical concept of water footprints (WF) and the production function framework, which provides a better understanding of crops' production impact on agricultural water use. This study incorporates the consumption of agro-chemicals, i.e., fertilizers, and pesticides; and a set of climate control variables such as annual rainfall, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature to evaluate its diverse effect on sustainable agricultural water use. The study undertakes robust panel data regression using instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV-2SLS) and an instrumental variable generalized method of moments (IV-GMM) estimators for 29 states in India for over 29 years (1991-2019). The empirical results based on the full panel (29 states) account for the magnitude of the positive and significant relationship of agricultural water use with cultivated land use and primary crops production. The findings exhibit that water consumption and fertilizers/pesticides use are highest in many regions, such as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Haryana. Notably, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab are the largest producers of wheat and rice among all the states. Likewise, excess water consumption in the southern states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is attributable to the high volume of rice production. Climatic conditions appear to have a moderating effect on water resources. Further, the study shows that the magnitude of fertilizers and pesticides consumption increases the likelihood of highvolume crops production. Also, there is significant spatial heterogeneity in their usage vis-àvis water appropriation in primary crops production. Lastly, this study demonstrates the relevance for the policymakers in prescribing the water policies in India. Chapter 4 analyzes the inter-state virtual water trade (VWT) flows embodied in agricultural commodities across the 30 states/UTs in India over 1994-2017. The study links the VWT flows with water scarcity concentration in Indian states to determine whether the water scarcity is caused by states’ domestic consumption or by exporting agricultural products from one state to another. Using the theoretical concept of Allan’s VWT (1997) and Leontief’s extended input-output model (1970), this study decomposes the water consumption into domestic water demand and export products to the other states. This study uses the final demand consumption to identify the direct and indirect water consumption during the production process. Empirical results show that the northern states have massive wheat and rice production, leading to substantial pressure on water resources. It helps other states’ water-saving through the inter-state movement of water embodied in wheat and rice products, especially from the highest virtual water outflows (northern states) to western and southern (water-scarce) states in India. The findings indicate that unsustainable water flows and diversity in water-endowments lead to water scarcity in water-abundant states. This study suggests that inter-state trade in water-intensive products would improve the spatial water efficiency in India with the stringent state-level water policy. Chapter 5 evaluates the long- versus short-run relationships between the total crops production, cultivable land, gross irrigated area, and agricultural water use in India during the period 1981-2018. Using the sustainable assessment framework and Autoregressive Distributed Lag-Error Correction Model (ARDL-ECM) approach, this study highlights the concern of excess foodgrains production over the years to reduce food insecurity and hunger rates. Further, this study investigates to recognize the negative impacts of food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and climate change on human development issues following the Sustainable Development Agenda of the United Nations General Assembly (2015). The study incorporates the set of climatic variables and consumption of agro-chemicals concerning the sustainability of crops produced in India. The ARDL bounds test of co-integration confirms the strong evidence of the long-run relationship among the variables. Empirical results show the positive and significant relationship of crops production with land use and gross irrigated area. It is noted that there is no specific significant effect of both the climatic variables and the agro-chemicals on total crops production. Further, the speed of adjustment estimated by the statistically significant Error Correction Term (ECT) shows that the dependent variable (total crops production) adjusts moderately to the short-run changes in other variables and moves to the long-run equilibrium. The findings of this study are robust based on the various stability and diagnostics tests. This study concludes with some policy implications that focus on ascertaining the significant social and environmental challenges affecting Indian agriculture while evaluating the potential policy restructure in boosting growth within this sector. Chapter 6 concludes this thesis by discussing the empirical findings from chapters 3 to 5 and brings together some concluding assessments. The thesis highlights the importance of agricultural water use, which is the critical input to the Indian growth of agriculture products. The thesis also provides several policy implications, suggests sustainable practices in the Indian agriculture sector, and sustainably utilizes water and landing resources. Furthermore, the outline for future research in the research area of water footprints is presented in this chapter.