India's Reservoirs Hit a 10-Year Low: Will Water Cost More Than Petrol by 2035?

Watch: 2035 India Water Crisis: पानी पेट्रोल से भी मंहगा होगा? | Groundwater Depletion | Sarvesh Mishra · ~70 min

This conversation lands while India’s water numbers are making headlines. Reservoirs are the buffer you can see. Groundwater is the buffer you cannot — and it is the one most Indian farms and households fall back on when the rain fails. Padma Shri awardee Umashankar Pandey, often called India’s Jal Yoddha, sits with Sarvesh Mishra on The Sarvesh Mishra Show to walk through that gap.

For the series itself, start at What Is The Sarvesh Mishra Show?

Reservoir figures as cited from Central Water Commission reporting. Village counts and water-share numbers as stated by the guest.

Reservoirs at a 10-year low

According to Central Water Commission data reported by The Indian Express, India’s 178 major reservoirs held 70 percent of their designed capacity as of 24 September 2026. That is below the 10-year average of 76.62 percent and well under last year’s 79 percent.

The cause is a weak monsoon. By 28 September, rainfall was about 12 percent below normal, with South India running a 23 percent deficit and the east and northeast close to 25 percent. A strengthening El Niño is being blamed. Maharashtra and Karnataka have already declared drought.

“The third world war will be fought over water”

Pandey opens with a claim he attributes to Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the United Nations: the first world war was fought over food, the second over oil, and the third will be fought over water. It sounds dramatic until he walks through the numbers. India holds 18 percent of the world’s population, 3 percent of its land, and barely 1 percent of its fresh water. That gap, he argues, is the actual crisis hiding behind every headline about dry taps in Bengaluru or Chennai.

India holds 18 percent of the world’s population, 3 percent of its land, and barely 1 percent of its fresh water.

— Umashankar Pandey, The Sarvesh Mishra Show Episode 29

How Bundelkhand became a warning — and a model

Pandey’s own story is tied to a region most of India associates with farmer suicides and drought. He describes a Bundelkhand that newspapers once called hungry, thirsty, and emptying out through migration — 20 to 25 farmer suicides reported in a single stretch, year after year.

His response was a slogan, not a scheme: khet par medh, medh par ped — a raised bund around every farm, planted with trees along its edge to hold soil and water in place. It started as one man on a bicycle with a drum, widely dismissed as eccentric, and grew into roughly 1,500 water villages built on the same model, eventually referenced by the Prime Minister on national radio four separate times.

Where India’s ponds and wells went

By Pandey’s account, India had roughly 25 lakh ponds and over 10,000 rivers at independence. Government survey data he cites puts Uttar Pradesh alone at 8 lakh ponds in 2009, down to barely 5 lakh today. Wells tell a similar story: a village that once had 20 working wells might have one left standing. He traces part of this to how water shifted from a community responsibility — festivals, customs, shared labour — to something state administration now owns and, in practice, often neglects.

The business nobody admits is a business

This is where Pandey gets pointed. A bottle of water that sells for ₹20 costs roughly ₹1.50 to ₹2 to produce, he says — which makes it one of the more quietly profitable businesses in the country, now run by names better known for steel, cars and diamonds. He extends this to tanker politics in cities, where, in his words, whoever controls the water tanker often wins the local election. Those associations are his characterisations, not audited figures. The underlying pattern — scarcity creating profit — is the point he wants on the table.

Cape Town, Chennai, and rivers already over the edge

He does not treat day-zero as hypothetical. Cape Town became the first major city to functionally run out of water, with the army rationing supply. Chennai hit a similar breaking point in 2019. He lists dead or dying rivers through major Indian cities — Delhi’s Sahibi, Mumbai’s Mithi, Kanpur’s Pandu among them — as the quieter version of the same crisis, playing out in slow motion rather than overnight. Bengaluru and parts of Maharashtra’s Marathwada sit in the same list of places that have already seen acute shortage.

What one household actually wastes

A person needs roughly 2 to 3 litres a day to drink and for basic bodily needs, by his accounting. The average urban Indian uses far more and wastes a significant share: water used to wash vegetables, mop floors, or wash a car that could be reused for plants instead of poured down a drain. He also cites water-footprint figures for everyday items — a kilogram of rice around 2,000 litres, a cotton garment several thousand more — intended less as hard data to quote and more as a way of making invisible water use visible.

What ethanol blending is doing to groundwater

Pandey’s warning is not only a 2035 scenario. As India pushes E20 petrol and scales ethanol blending, government data is starting to show the water cost behind it.

According to Food Secretary Sanjeev Chopra — a government official, not a Show guest — producing one litre of ethanol from rice takes around 10,790 litres of water once irrigation is included, a figure he shared at a global conference in Delhi in 2024. Growing a single kilogram of rice alone can take up to 5,000 litres. NITI Aayog’s ethanol roadmap puts the water footprint of sugarcane-based ethanol at 3,000 litres per litre of ethanol, most of it tied to growing the crop rather than processing it.

This matters most in states already under groundwater stress. Karnataka, India’s third-largest sugarcane producer, was found in its 2024 groundwater assessment to be extracting nearly 68.44 percent of its annual extractable groundwater, with 45 of 237 assessment units classified as over-exploited and another 15 as critical, according to The New Indian Express. Five districts, including Bengaluru Urban and Bengaluru Rural, fall into the over-exploited category.

The government’s latest groundwater report card

In July 2026, the government told the Rajya Sabha that 730 of India’s 6,762 groundwater assessment units — about 10.8 percent — are over-exploited: more water pulled out every year than nature puts back. The national stage of groundwater extraction stands at 60.63 percent, up slightly from 60.48 percent a year earlier.

That national average hides the cluster. Over-exploited blocks sit in the north-west (Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and western Uttar Pradesh), the west (Rajasthan and Gujarat) and the south (Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh). These are the regions where Pandey’s warnings feel closest to home.

There is one data point that gives hope. Delhi’s stage of groundwater extraction fell to 92.10 percent in 2025, down from 100.77 percent in 2024 and 119.61 percent in 2017. Recovery is possible, but only where people act — the same lesson the water villages of Bundelkhand have been teaching for years.

Frequently asked questions

The practical thread is the same one Bundelkhand’s water villages keep teaching: reservoirs are the photograph; groundwater is the savings account; households still waste the water they could reuse. Guest characterisations and cited official figures should be independently verified.

Sarvesh Mishra is an Indian entrepreneur, journalist, interviewer and the host of The Sarvesh Mishra Show. He is the Founder of Red Hot Media House Pvt. Ltd. and CureSoulLife Pvt. Ltd., and the author of Love With Benifit.

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