PAKISTAN — Pakistan push for solar energy in its agriculture sector is inadvertently accelerating a looming water crisis, particularly in the breadbasket province of Punjab. As farmers transition to solar-powered tube wells to escape high diesel costs and an erratic power grid the freedom of near-zero-cost irrigation is driving the rapid depletion of groundwater resources.
The solar boom has led to an estimated 650,000 tube wells now running on solar power across Pakistan. Farmers are taking advantage of this unlimited, cheap power to irrigate their crops far more regularly, including multiple times a day a practice known as “pulse irrigation” that was previously unaffordable.
Dual Impact: Over-Extraction and Crop Change
The transition has coincided with an alarming decline in water tables. Internal Punjab water authority documents show that areas where the water level has shrunk below 60 feet a critically low level have increased by 25% between 2020 and 2024.
This crisis is compounded by a shift in agricultural patterns:
• The size of water-intensive rice fields in Pakistan expanded by 30% between 2023 and 2025.
• Conversely the amount of land dedicated to growing less thirsty crops, like maize fell by 10%.
Farmers are seeing immediate benefits, with some saving up to 2 million rupees (about $7,000) in power costs annually. However, environmental scientists warn that the unregulated solar push “lacks any method to the madness” and that without comprehensive mapping of wells and real-time withdrawal monitoring, the water crisis will continue unabated, threatening long-term food security.
While the Punjab government acknowledges the dual nature of solarization clean energy impacting the water table the federal power minister initially denied that solar tube wells were a cause of the depletion. Officials have since undertaken pilot aquifer-recharge projects and are reviving colonial-era irrigation infrastructure to stabilize river flows and reduce the need for excessive groundwater extraction.