Question

Read the following passage carefully and answer the question that follows. For decades, water policy in agrarian economies has rested on a comforting fiction: that groundwater is a free and limitless input. Subsidised electricity has allowed tube-wells to proliferate, and farmers, responding rationally to the incentives before them, have pumped aquifers far beyond their recharge rates. The result is a perverse equilibrium - wells must be drilled ever deeper, costs rise silently, and the poorest cultivators, unable to afford deeper bores, are the first to lose access. Economists call this the tragedy of the commons, but the phrase understates the institutional failure involved. When extraction is invisible and unmetered, no price signal warns of scarcity until the aquifer itself collapses. Several states have attempted to ration power supply to agriculture, yet these measures have been politically fragile and administratively porous. A more durable remedy, scholars argue, is to make water itself visible: meter extraction, price it progressively, and return the revenues to watershed restoration. Until scarcity is measured, it cannot be managed; and what cannot be managed will, eventually, be mourned. What is the central idea of the passage?