Will cleantech mobilize to prevent water shortages in India?

Two new reports this week gave urgency to efforts to reduce water use in India's agriculture sector.

First, the Indian government's State of the Environment report warned: "Groundwater reserves are becoming more and more depleted even as surface water sources become too polluted for human use."

That was followed by a study in the journal Nature that presented unnerving data on groundwater depletion in India, as viewed by satellites orbiting the Earth as part of NASA's Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment. The satellites showed that the water table in India is falling 1.6 inches per year, losing 109 cubic kilometers (88.4 million acre-feet) from August 2002 to October 2008.

The study said the losses were unrelated to weather or climactic features, attributing them instead to to massive pumping of underground water, mostly for irrigating crops. India's irrigated land tripled to 33.1 million hectares (82 million acres) from 1970 to 1999.

Demand for crops isn't likely to subside anytime soon, creating a perfect market opportunity for technologies that can reduce the water wasted in the irrigation process. The current practice of flood irrigation consumes large amounts of energy to pump water, much of which is wasted (see Cleantech panel: The days of cheap water are over).

Drip irrigation systems can prevent the waste of up to 70 percent of the water used in flood irrigation, also reducing fertilizer needs by 30 percent and saving energy. Drip irrigation delivers water using a network of pipes that have a series of outlet points. Each point distributes a precisely controlled dose of water and nutrients directly into the root zone of the plant.

Some of the promising companies in the sector include Jalgaon, India-based Jain Irrigation Systems (BSE:JISLJAL) and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Driptech Technologies.

But while the technology can be effective, it's not as sexy an investment as an electric sports car, so the question remains as to what investors can speed the deployment of such water-saving technologies. To date, such companies have turned to the International Finance Corp., a division of the World Bank, or Europe’s Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (see IFC pumps up water focus in India with $45M for Jain Irrigation and REEEP assists €15M drip irrigation buy in India).

Such projects have proven their ability to recoup their costs, albeit on a smaller scale than many U.S. or European venture capitalists are accustomed to. But don't this week's two reports indicate that it's time that the cleantech sector make the deployment of such technologies a top priority?