Thirty-four per cent of the world’s groundwater monitoring stations recorded below-to-much-below-normal levels in 2025, up from 25% a year earlier. The finding comes from the World Meteorological Organization’s State of Global Water Resources 2025 report, published around 17-18 September 2026. Rivers worldwide endured one of their driest years in three decades. India’s groundwater decline features prominently among the report’s findings, with northern and northwestern regions singled out for persistent falls driven by over-abstraction.
The report measures terrestrial water storage, a combined tally of groundwater, soil moisture, snow and surface water held across a region. Below-normal storage means less water is available overall, not only in individual wells. For northern and northwestern India, the WMO recorded below-normal terrestrial water storage through 2025, continuing a pattern documented in earlier assessments.
The report’s 34% figure covers monitoring stations spread across river basins on every continent, not a single country or region. A station is classed as below-to-much-below normal when its recorded levels fall well short of its own long-term average for that time of year. The rise from 25% of stations in 2024 to 34% in 2025 shows the share of the network under stress widening within twelve months, rather than a handful of new trouble spots appearing in isolation.
What the decline means on the ground
Over-abstraction happens when farmers, cities and industries draw water from aquifers faster than rainfall and rivers can refill them. Across much of northern and northwestern India, groundwater is the primary source for both irrigation and drinking supplies. A persistent decline pushes farmers towards deeper, costlier wells and higher pumping energy bills. It also puts pressure on groundwater-fed drinking water schemes in towns and villages without reliable piped alternatives.
Deeper wells are not a permanent fix. Each metre added to a borewell raises the cost of the pump, the electricity needed to lift water and the risk that the well runs dry again within a few seasons. Smallholder farmers, who dominate Indian agriculture, are least able to absorb these repeated costs. Municipal water utilities that rely on the same aquifers face parallel pressure, since falling water tables can force them to dig new borewells or invest in costlier surface-water treatment instead.
The global picture mirrors this regional stress. Close to one in three groundwater stations worldwide showed worse-than-normal conditions in 2025, a jump of nine percentage points in a single year. UN News, reporting on the same findings on 17 September 2026, described a “new water reality” that requires governments to plan around increasingly unreliable freshwater supplies rather than assume past rainfall patterns will hold.
A trend built over several years
Down to Earth, the Indian science-media outlet, reported on 18 September 2026 that India’s groundwater decline reflects a persistent pattern flagged across successive WMO assessments, rather than a single bad year. That persistence matters because aquifers recover slowly. A river can rise again after one strong monsoon, but a depleted aquifer often needs years of sustained recharge to return to earlier levels, if it recovers at all.
The practical stakes reach beyond the north and northwest. Groundwater and surface water systems connect across river basins, so national policy responses to a shrinking resource affect irrigation allocation, drinking water spending and cropping decisions nationwide. Falling water tables also raise longer-term risks of land subsidence and saline intrusion into coastal aquifers.
The WMO frames its 2025 findings as a call for better monitoring and demand management rather than a one-off warning. Rivers running at their driest in three decades, alongside a sharp rise in stressed groundwater stations, point to compounding pressure on freshwater systems rather than an isolated regional problem confined to South Asia.
The strain on groundwater also compounds a monsoon season that has already left India’s kharif crops with patchy damage, adding further pressure on farm incomes in regions already grappling with water scarcity.
