AURANGABAD, India (Reuters) — Despite pleas from the government not to, Indian farmers like Santosh Wagh went right back to planting sugar cane as soon as the first nourishing monsoon rains brought water to his drought-stricken region of central India.
For growers like Wagh from the Indian state of Maharashtra, sugar cane has two attributes that make planting the crop lucrative: hardiness and state policies that ensure higher returns.
These farmers plant cane even as its outsized water demands threaten to plunge this traditionally arid region back into a drought.
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“It is the only reliable crop. Earlier this year, I cultivated onions and incurred a 50,000 rupees loss as prices crashed,” said Wagh, who plants 1.5 acres of sugar cane.
Maharashtra, the biggest sugar producing region in India, suffered the worst drought in four decades four months ago. It ravaged crops, killed livestock, depleted reservoirs and slowed down hydroelectric power output.
Environmental activists and the government blamed the rapid expansion of sugar cane growing for creating the water scarcity. Cane consumes about nine million litres of water per acre during its 14-month long growing cycle compared to just 1.6 million litres over four months for chickpeas.
Without government intervention to reset the revenue balance in favour of other crops, experts warn the sustained production of sugar cane will further deplete scarce water resources. This could create social unrest stemming from the widening income gap between cane growers and other farmers.
“The government asks farmers to shift to less water consuming crops, but it does little to support those crops. It failed to solve the problems of oilseed and pulses growers,” said Pradeep Purandare, a former professor at the Maharashtra Water and Land Management Institute based in Aurangabad.
