Can you dine in comfort ever again?

The next time you sit down for dinner, chew on this one. Every kilo of rice that you eat has cost upward of 3,000 litres of water by the time you bought it. And that is on the premise that the yield of rice per acre on a tract is about 40 quintals or four tonnes.
The figures are staggering when you look at them in absolute terms. One rice crop needs six turns of 2 million litres per acre. That is over 12 million litres per acre for each crop. And in many parts of the country farmers cultivate three crops.
There is more bad news. For sugarcane, water consumption is twice as much.
There lies a travesty of truth in all this. The farmer’s staple is bajra, or ragi or jowar which consume less than 20 per cent of those monstrous water needs of rice or sugarcane—and the farmer population in India continues to account for nearly 40 per cent, if you don’t account for all those ecosystem refugees who migrate to the cities and take to unhealthy eating habits.
It’s only the urban middle class that has been weaned on rice and sugar. And the vortex has assumed such virulent proportions that the farmer today, rich or poor, cannot support his lifestyle without his economic dependence on the urban system. So he ends up producing more and more of what he, in any case, does not need – his family’s staple still is bajra, jowar or ragi, which are the most friendly on water use.
And, as figures for the last two years are beginning to show, sugar, the worst water guzzler, is not needed by the urban populace, too, not at least in the massive quantities that our farmers are continuing to produce them—at the irrationally inefficient cost of water. The glut in sugar has reached alarming proportions. And a move away from sugar to other water–friendly crops will soon be a strategic need.