A central sector scheme for community-led, demand-side management of groundwater in water-stressed blocks of seven states, run by the Ministry of Jal Shakti with World Bank support, in which part of the money reaches states only when they show measurable results such as better data, water security plans and falling depletion.
Groundwater is the hidden backbone of Indian farming. Well over half of irrigated land and most rural drinking water depend on aquifers rather than canals, and India pumps more groundwater each year than any other country. Cheap or free farm electricity, the spread of tube wells since the Green Revolution and water-hungry crops such as paddy and sugarcane in dry regions have pushed many blocks into the "over-exploited" category, where annual extraction exceeds the recharge that rain and rivers provide. Water tables in parts of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and peninsular hard-rock areas have fallen steadily for decades.
Earlier policy concentrated on the supply side: building check dams, recharge pits and watershed structures. These help, but if pumping keeps rising, any extra recharge is simply drawn out again. Atal Bhujal Yojana, often called Atal Jal, was designed to change that logic. It treats an aquifer as a shared village resource and asks the people who use it to measure it, budget it and reduce demand. It was approved in late 2019 for an initial five-year period and later extended. This page looks at the scheme as an experiment in results-based financing and local governance, rather than as an engineering programme.
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