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which are responsible for regulating water.
Indian law has virtually no restrictions on who can pump groundwater, how much and for what purpose. Anyone, it seems, can -- and does -- extract water as long as it is under his or her patch of land. That could apply to homeowner, farmer or industry.
Electric pumps have accelerated the problem, enabling farmers and others to squeeze out far more groundwater than they had been able to draw by hand for hundreds of years.
The spread of free or vastly discounted electricity has not helped, either. A favorite boon of politicians courting the rural vote, the low rates have encouraged farmers, especially those with large landholdings, to pump out groundwater with abandon.
"We forgot that water is a costly item," lamented K. P. Singh, regional director of the Central Groundwater Board, in his office in the city of Jaipur. "Our feeling about proper, judicious use of water vanished."
With the proliferation of electric pumps, he added, it took only 20 years for Rajasthan's groundwater reserves to sink to their current levels. Twenty more years of the same policy could be catastrophic.
The central government has been coaxing states to require the harvesting of rainwater, for instance by installing tanks or digging ponds, so the water will seep into the earth and recharge the aquifers.
Other solutions are politically trickier. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has warned of the consequences of free or cheap electricity and urged state officials to crack down on pumping. But state officials, attuned to potential backlash, have been slow to respond.
Tighter restrictions would in any case run up against one of the government's top priorities, one that India has long considered vital for its independence: the goal of growing its own food.
The fear now, among those who study Indian agriculture, is that without a careful review of water policy and a switch to crops that use less water, India stands to imperil its food production.
Here in the dust bowl of Rajasthan, desperate water times have already called for desperate water measures.
On a parched, hot morning not far from Mr. Yadav's home, a train pulled into the railway station at a village called Peeplee Ka Bas. Here, the wells have run dry and the water table fallen so low that it is too salty even to irrigate the fields.
The train came bearing precious cargo: 15 tankers loaded with nearly 120,000 gallons of clean, sweet drinking water.
The water regularly travels more than 150 miles, taking nearly two days, by pipeline and then by rail, so that the residents of a small neighboring town can fill their buckets with water for 15 minutes every 48 hours.
It is a logistically complicated, absurdly expensive proposition. Bringing the water here costs the state about a
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