India, Nov. 14 -- INDIA'S groundwater crisis is often narrated through familiar images: a failed borewell, a falling water table, a tanker arriving in summer, or a farmer borrowing again to drill deeper. Rishu Garg's The Borewell Paradox: The Rationality of an Irrational Crisis asks us to look beyond these images. Why do people continue to make choices that, when repeated across a landscape, undermine the resource on which their own prosperity depends? And why do public programmes and professional interventions, designed in the name of water conservation, so often fail to alter that trajectory?

The answer, Garg argues, does not lie in blaming the farmer. The farmer at the centre of this book is not irrational. He reads the sky and soil, ...