NEWS

The amount of groundwater pumped out by Delhiites and others across northern India is highest in the world and is contributing as much as 5% to the total rise in sea levels. A new study using satellite data has found that the region — a swathe of over 2,000km from west Pakistan to Bangladesh along north India — extracts a mindboggling 54 trillion litres from the ground every year, a figure that's likely to cause serious concern over the future of water availability. The study, conducted by Virendra Mani Tiwari from National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, along with scientists from University of Colorado, US, found that the average depletion of groundwater level in the Indian part of the region was an alarming 10cm a year. "We found the region of maximum groundwater loss centred around Delhi and included Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and west Uttar Pradesh," Tiwari told TOI. The study was published on September 17, 2009 in the prestigious US-based Geophysical Research Letter.