As glaciers shrink, India’s farmers need to adopt resilient agricultural practices

The Himalayan glaciers that feed India’s rivers are shrinking, posing a threat to its farmland productivity and, with global warming showing no signs of slowing down, farmers will have to embrace resource-responsible agricultural practices to keep the country fed.

It’s well-known that India’s farmlands are heavily reliant on the country’s annual four-month monsoon. However, glacial meltwater, which feeds the country’s major rivers and replenishes groundwater reserves, is just as crucial to agriculture, especially in the Indo-Gangetic plain.

As much as roughly 70 per cent of India’s farmlands, or millions of farmers growing crops like sugarcane, rice and cotton, depend on glacial meltwater for their irrigation needs. With climate change disrupting weather patterns and making rainfall — even during the monsoon — increasingly erratic, farmers’ dependence on glacial meltwater is only going to increase.

Losses doubling

However as rising temperatures cause glaciers to retreat, this vital source of water could soon be exhausted. The Switzerland-based World Glacier Monitoring Service reports that global glacial loss has nearly doubled every decade since 1970.

The observations apply to all of the world’s glaciers. However, they offer a credible indication of how rapidly glaciers in the Himalayas, commonly referred to as the world’s third pole because of the quantity of glacial ice it contains, are shrinking.

Crucially, this is playing out at a time when India’s agricultural demand for water is surging.

The country needs its farmlands to be more productive than ever to feed a population that is already the world’s largest but is still growing. At the same time, it is also becoming increasingly affluent, driving up demand for food per capita.

Tech-enabled approach

To keep productivity high in an environment that’s only going to becoming increasingly more water-stressed, farmers have no choice but to adapt to using less water to nourish their crops.

That way not only will their approach to farming evolve into becoming climate and water-stress resilient, but it will also conserve groundwater that will be replenished less and less as we lose our glaciers.

A combination of precision agriculture and new-age, specially developed bio-products could hold the key.

With a technologically enabled approach to farming – Sensor technology, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – all work in concert to determine the nutritional and moisture inputs that the crop needs in the right quantity and at the right time.

This information can empower farmers to farm their fields in a resource responsible manner, using resources, like water, in precise quantities.

This implies that in the case of irrigation, for instance, only the right amount of water as the crop needs is administered to it, through methods like drip irrigation, as opposed to flooding the field, which leads to a lot of wastage.

Use of bio-solutions

Similarly, the use of bio-solutions can further reduce water use. For example, UPL’s Zeba is a starch-based, biodegradable bio-solution. It is super-absorbent, capable of soaking up and retaining as much as 400 times its own weight in water. It is effective for six months. When applied at the roots, the crop can use up as much water as it needs, from the amount Zeba has absorbed. It makes crops drought resilient and enables sustainable, resource responsible agriculture.

Its impact has been tangible — Zeba was used across 1.5 lakh acres of farmland in 2023 across India. Its use saved 72 billion liters of water in just one year.

The Paris Agreement struck at the COP 21 climate change conference in Paris in December 2015, aimed to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels with the ultimate target set at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Fast forward to COP 29 and the world has failed woefully to make progress toward these targets. Instead, it is headed for a temperature increase of over 3 degrees Celsius on the current trajectory, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

If the world can limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it would dramatically ease heat stress on our glaciers.

The author is CEO of UPL SAS