Data Centres, Sugarcane, Drought: Maharashtra’s Water Problem is Policy-Made
The mismatch between state policies and the lived realities of millions in Maharashtra isn’t an aberration.
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By August, Rahim Khan knew it was going to be a tough year ahead.
Khan is a farmer in the northern Maharashtra district of Jalgaon who cultivates soybean and cotton. Each time he went to his farm, he realised he would salvage only a third of his produce this year.
The rains, after an initial promise, had failed to show up. His crop, after waiting for over a month, had started to wilt. There was no water anywhere, either. The wells had been dry since the summer. Much before the state government declared a drought, Khan knew what this El Niño year meant: a year of precarious existence.
In Mumbai, an alternate reality was playing out simultaneously. On 18 August, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis attended at the Indo-American Chamber of National Convention, surrounded by US officials and businesses from both countries. If El Niño was on his mind, Fadnavis made sure he didn’t show it.
Standing on the dais, Fadnavis boasted that Maharashtra held a whopping 65 percent of the country’s data centre capacity. But it wasn’t enough. Maharashtra, he said, had inked plans to build data centres worth 300 billion USD in the next few years, which would take Maharashtra’s data centre capacity to 5.7 gigawatts (GW).
For context, India’s total capacity is around 1.5 GW currently, and Fadnavis hopes that Maharashtra, alone, can build four times that capacity by 2031. A 100 MW data centre currently consumes 2 million litres of water each day.
From the frenzied construction of water-guzzling data centres to encouraging sugarcane cultivation and becoming the country’s largest ethanol producer, Maharashtra’s policies have ignored its own agrarian distress and hurtled itself towards this drought.
In this El Niño year, this wilful ignorance is coming back to bite it.
A Festering Crisis And Ignorance
Maharashtra’s agrarian crisis is well-known and unrelenting. For at least two decades now, farmers in the state—first in Vidarbha and then in the Marathwada region—have taken their own lives, driven by a deadly cocktail of poor crop renumeration, constant losses and mounting debts they can’t pay off.
Climate change has only exacerbated this crisis—from floods to droughts, from excess rainfall to no rains at all, Maharashtra is witnessing it all, often in a matter of months.
Water holds the key to understand these numbers. Agriculture in Vidarbha, which has recorded a large share of these suicides, is nearly all-rain fed and lacks irrigation facilities. Of the 82 irrigation projects planned there, 68 remain incomplete. Marathwada, on the other hand, faces the full wrath of climate change frequently—from droughts to extreme rainfall, the region is caught in a cycle. Between 2012 and 2019, it faced four droughts.
This year, El Niño has aggravated this crisis: overall, Maharashtra faces a 18 percent deficit in its average rainfall during the season. But this deficit widens to as much as 50 percent in some districts. Yet, the state government’s priorities lie elsewhere—in building and taking pride in data centres, for instance.
About 60 percent of India’s current data centre capacity is located in and around Mumbai. A calculation by The Hindustan Times showed that proposed new data centres in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region alone would likely consume 865 million litres of water each day, which is nearly 10 percent of the region’s total needs.
Even though Mumbai doesn’t face a drought this year, it is barely able to meet its water needs. Inadequate rainfall in the city’s reservoirs means Mumbaikars will have to contend with a 10 percent water cut through the year. A new dam, planned in the neighbouring Palghar district, is an ecological disaster in the making—more than 200,000 trees will be cut and more than 2500 locals will be displaced from their homes.
Yet, the government is boasting about new data centres that will be built in the region. The government is now mulling a ‘data centre policy’ which will mandate the use of recycled water, instead of drinking water, but there are questions about whether the city even has the capacity to recycle such large quantities of water.
A Misdirected Priority
Amidst this botched up demand supply equation enters ethanol. Maharashtra, like with data centres, has another credential that might be embarrassing to hold in the days of a drought: it has the largest ethanol-producing capacity as well as the most number of distilleries making ethanol.
Ethanol production depends on two major crops—sugarcane and maize. The government’s emphasis on ensuring a fair price for ethanol—it notifies the price that oil companies must pay ethanol makers—has encouraged many farmers to switch to cultivating sugarcane and maize, ditching traditional crops like soybean, cotton, jowar and bajra.
Sugarcane sucks the water table dry. Official data from the Tamil Nadu government’s agriculture department shows that while jowar and maize require 500 mm of water over 100 days, ragi needs 310mm and paddy requires 1250 mm, sugarcane tops them all by demanding 2200mm across its yearlong cultivation cycle.
Yet, in Maharashtra, despite its agrarian crises, the cultivation of sugarcane is only rising and rising, depleting the state’s water reserves rapidly. The area under sugarcane cultivation jumped more than 17 percent in one year alone, the Economic Survey this year showed, while production was up by 22 percent.
This is a trend that is likely to grow, says veteran farm leader from Vidarbha, Vijay Jawandia.
Similarly, he said, farmers are increasingly taking to maize, in order to feed this ethanol frenzy. The economic survey showed the area under maize cultivation jumped by 30 percent in just a year, whereas production went up by 40 percent in that period.
The result of this is farmers giving up on traditional crops like jowar, bajra, and soybean, which require relatively little water to grow.
A Generation Comes And Goes
The Maharashtra government, belying expectations that it would wait until October to declare a drought, moved swiftly and announced it in September, hoping to reassure citizens of its efforts.
“While this generation has endured severe drought, we will ensure the next generation does not,” Fadnavis bravely declared.
The same day, the state’s opposition leader in the legislative council, Ambadas Danve, posted a video with a montage of clips from Fadnavis echoing the exact words over the years at various rallies. “12 years is a generation. Fadnavis came to power 13 years ago,” the video said.
The video resonated with many. After all, political watchers remember Fadnavis, when he came to power in 2014, uttered two words wherever he went: Jalyukt Shivar. It was his brainchild that he launched within weeks of coming to power and was meant to be a game changer water conservation and management project. More than 10,000 crore were spent on it.
12 years later, the scheme’s mentions can barely be heard in Mumbai’s corridors of power.
There’s a reason why the scheme has vanished from the Fadnavis government’s vocabulary: it had promised to make Maharashtra drought-free by 2019. Seven years later, farmers like Rahim Khan continue to wait.
(Kunal Purohit is an award-winning independent journalist and author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Popstars (HarperCollins). The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)