Read the following passage and answer the item that follows. Your answer to this item should be based on the passage only.

India's water and irrigation policy faces a tangle of pressures at once: falling groundwater tables in the very regions that grow the most water-intensive crops, ageing canal networks that lose much of what they carry before it reaches a field, and rising demand from cities that increasingly compete with farms for the same rivers and aquifers. Yet there is real progress too: micro-irrigation adoption is climbing, several States have begun metering agricultural power to curb wasteful pumping, and river-basin-level planning bodies are for the first time bringing upstream and downstream users into the same conversation.

Which one of the following statements best reflects the critical message conveyed by the passage given above?