A water budget reveals Rayalaseema's groundwater inequality

Rain-fed peanut crops and grasslands had positive BWP of 200–300 mm per year. These estimates show how farming systems can contribute differently to the same groundwater resource, even within one village.

Who recharges the village aquifer?

Aggregating the plot estimates to village level revealed a stark distribution. Farmers classified as wealthier made up a 26% minority and appeared to exploit most of the groundwater resource for horticulture. A large majority of poorer rain-fed peanut farmers and pastoralists (people who graze livestock) replenished it.

Policymakers often ignore the critical contribution that these economically disadvantaged groups make to the shared resource.

The study identifies a direct interdependence. Groundwater-dependent farmers rely in part on recharge generated by rain-fed farms and grazing lands. Those lands support less profitable livelihoods, yet their recharge helps sustain the more profitable irrigated agriculture that depends on the same aquifer.

Charlotte Hemingway, first author and an IFCWS researcher, said: “The regional water balance so far seems positive, but our results suggest that small increases in the area of cropping systems with highly negative BWP such as fruit trees would suffice to induce groundwater overexploitation, especially if this increase happens at the expense of the area with positive BWP.”

That warning concerns a conditional risk, not a forecast of inevitable collapse. If a small increase in highly negative-BWP fruit-tree area came at the expense of positive-BWP land, additional irrigation demand could push the village toward groundwater overexploitation. The study suggests that scenario; it does not report the shift as an accomplished outcome.

Can fruit expansion remain sustainable?

The policy timing makes the findings especially immediate. The Andhra Pradesh government recently unveiled an ambitious Rs 1 lakh-crore project to transform historically parched Rayalaseema into the “Fruit Bowl of the World.”

The plan seeks to expand horticultural area (land used for crops such as fruit and vegetables) from 841,000 hectares (2.08 million acres) to 1,441,000 hectares (3.56 million acres) through major irrigation projects.

Co-author M Sekhar, professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at IISc, said: “A robust assessment is needed to determine the water that will be imported through canals to improve the current fragile water balance at the village scale against climate risks as well as to sustainably satisfy the future needs of altered crops.”

How can the framework guide planning?

Co-author and IISc alumna Rutuja Chitra-Tarak led the open-source software (software whose source code users can inspect and modify) included with the paper. The tool lets users compute BWP for any cropping system or region of interest. The authors hope it will help design sustainable agricultural development policies.

The article by C. Hemingway and colleagues appeared in the Journal of Hydrology in 2026 under the title “Accounting for the unaccounted: a new framework for incorporating farm social diversity in micro-regional water budgets.” The term “micro-regional” refers here to village scale. Its DOI is 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2026.136621.

Because the published application centers on one village, its percentages and millimetre values do not establish the same balance across Rayalaseema or other regions. The authors also calculate BWP under assumed optimal farming conditions, so the measure represents estimated potential rather than a guaranteed outcome for every farm.

The policy lesson is narrow but consequential: planners expanding irrigated fruit cultivation must count both the water orchards withdraw and the recharge supplied by farms and grazing lands that conventional accounting has overlooked.