Free or cheap electricity for pumps keeps farmers afloat and state discoms underwater. As aquifers fall, borewells deepen and pumps draw more power — a feedback loop that shows up neither in agriculture GDP nor in climate pledges, but in annual bailout requests.

Fixing this requires metering politics as much as hydrology. Our field reporting across four states suggests pilots succeed when farmers co-own tariff design, not when reform arrives as a midnight notification.