India’s Ground Water Irrigation Economy: The Challenge of Balancing Livelihoods and Environment

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Abstract

Stagnating agriculture and consequent failure of rapid economic growth to bring about poverty reduction as envisaged have been major constraints for India’s economic growth. Contrary to the view that slow-down in public investment for irrigation development is mainly responsible for the deceleration of agricultural growth, the paper argues that in spite of the Government initiatives and substantial investments in irrigation development, the area irrigated by public irrigation systems in India has stagnated or even declined. India’s irrigation economy has been undergoing a dramatic transformation with the control of irrigation shifting from the government to the individual farmers through millions of wells owned and operated by them. Though the booming tube well irrigation has generated substantial socio-ecological dividends in terms of flood mitigation and reduction in water logging and soil salinization, it has also been responsible for resource depletion and contamination of ground water in some parts of the country, leading to various adverse environmental and socio-economic consequences. There is need for achieving the right balance between supply and demand side measures for forging a sustainable ground water governance regime. Problems of groundwater overexploitation in India are bound to become more acute and widespread in the years to come unless corrective mechanisms are put in place before the problem becomes insolvable or not worth solving. Lack of information and absence of systematic monitoring of availability and withdrawal of ground water is a major barrier that prevents the transition from groundwater development to management mode. Further, unlike in the case of surface water irrigation systems, public agencies have only an indirect role to play in the national ground water sector due to its development mostly in the private, ‘informal’ sector and the quality and amount of application of science and management to this sector has been much less when compared to the former.

This paper attempts to trace the history of irrigation development from early 19th century tothe present to emphasize the shifting of focus from the government controlled major andmedium surface irrigation systems to farmer-controlled ground water irrigation systems.Various ideas adopted for creating demand-management regimes through direct regulations,economic instruments, tradable property rights and community resource management around the world have been reviewed to prove the point that ground water governance, throughout the world, is still ‘work in progress’. It also emphasizes the need for recognizing the importance of ground water irrigation systems in South Asia and for information systems and resource planning through establishing appropriate systems for regular ground water monitoring and for undertaking systematic scientific research on the occurrence, use and ways and means for augmenting and managing the resource. Need for initiating suitable demand and supply side management mechanisms and for undertaking ground water management in the river basin context have also been stressed.

Introduction

The Groundwater Revolution

Socio-economic significance and impacts of the groundwater boom

Sustaining the Groundwater Boom

Environmental Economics of Aquifers and Institutional Response

[Situation 1] atomistic individualism (s=0; S=0; h=0; H=0):

occurs when each farmer is an insignificant user in an abundantly recharged water table aquifer; his abstraction has little impact on himself or other users; likewise, aquifer development has little discernible impact on the individual user; here, interdependence amongst users goes unnoticed; ‘aquifer community’ is non-existent, and rational expectations fail to generate institutional dynamic of the kind we observe in the remaining four situations;

[Situation 2] collusive opportunism (s=0; S occurs when aquifer development sharply raises the cost of groundwater abstraction without greatly reducing water supply or quality; here, wealthy farmers establish de facto control over the resource, and collude against the resource poor but spearhead political mobilization to defend their access to and control over the resource; irrigators display limited inter-dependence and are a weak aquifer community;

[Situation 3] rivalrous gaming (s0):

occurs when aquifer development sharply raises the cost of water production and also limits available groundwater supply that users actively compete for; this condition promotes intense and destructive rivalry among competing users; irrigators display a strong sense of interdependence but are a dysfunctional aquifer community; sporadic evidence of beneficial effects of community conservation fail to metamorphose into organized collective action;

[Situation 4] co-operative gaming(s0; H>>0):

under certain catalytic conditions, rivalrous game metamorphoses into a co-operative game that reduces the cost and risk of water production and augments water availability to the entire community; positive expectations that so result foster a strong sense of benign interdependence and a highly functional aquifer community; such aquifer communities are ripe for proactive local groundwater self-governance;

[Situation 5] exit (s This state occurs when groundwater development results in rapid quality deterioration without affecting supply. Costs and risks of groundwater use become prohibitive; and users begin giving up irrigated farming or farming itself. Pervasive negative expectations inspire fatalism, hopelessness and despair that overwhelm the strong sense of interdependence; aquifer community takes a downward spin and eventually withers away.

The framework set out above is helpful in making sense out of how millions of farmers have responded to the ecological consequences of rapid groundwater development in different parts of India. In alluvial aquifers of arid western Rajasthan and North Gujarat, groundwater irrigators are running a race to the ‘pump house’; competitive deepening of tube wells is the name of the game here. In these regions, we never hear about spontaneous efforts by farming communities to harvest rainwater and recharge aquifers on a large scale; the predominant institutional response takes the form of mobilizing to maximize and preserve energy subsidies. In humid alluvial plains of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghana basin, groundwater irrigation here is a major poverty-alleviator and poses no environmental threat. Yet it is rapidly shrinking in the face of a stringent energy squeeze; and small farmers here are unable to organize and mobilize political power to save their livelihoods. Most large-scale mass-based groundwater recharge initiatives are concentrated in hard-rock areas; here, well owners compete fiercely to maximize their share in available groundwater resource but can be organized in a cooperative game to augment the resource and regulate the abstraction. In fragile coastal aquifers, the ecological fall-out of rapid and unregulated expansion in groundwater abstraction are swift and disastrous, leaving ‘exit’ from irrigated farming as the dominant option.

In search of sustainability


In thinking about forging a sustainable groundwater governance regime, the emerging global consensus is for achieving the right balance between supply and demand side measures. Governments can meet groundwater depletion in a locale by investing in recharge and/or water imports. However, without effective demand-side measures, increased supply will quickly invite increased abstraction, leaving the resource depleted. In creating demand management regimes, four sets of ideas have been tried worldwide: direct regulation, economic instruments, tradable property rights, community resource management. These are reviewed briefly; but the interesting upshot of this discussion is that throughout the world, groundwater governance is still work in progress.

Direct regulation through administrative action:


State claiming eminent domain and using the administrative apparatus of the government to regulate groundwater abstraction dominates the GwG regime in many countries, notably the Sultanate of Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and of course the western United States. In South Asia too, groundwater departments in most Indian states as well as Bangladesh have norms for siting irrigation wells and the minimum spacing to be maintained to minimize well-interference externalities. India has a draft groundwater law tossing around now for over 30 years; several state governments have passed groundwater laws providing regulatory powers (Planning Commission 2007). The regulatory effectiveness of these however has remained limited for a variety of reasons, the chief being the lack of popular support, political will and enforcement capacity commensurate with the enforcement challenge.

Countries like Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran however have used this instrument with greater vigor and seriousness. The hallmark of Oman’s GwG regime is the strong and very visible hand of the state. The experience everywhere has been mixed, in fact quite poor, as was concluded by a conference of MENA countries in 2000 (World Bank and Swiss Agency for International Development 2000:18). Elsewhere, even talk about regulation has generated a groundswell of opportunistic response from farmers. In Mexico, the political leaders have been issuing, from time to time since 1949, ‘regularization’ deadlines after which new tube wells would be banned in stressed aquifers. Every time, however, the threat has invariably invoked a tube well-boring spree (Scott et al. 2003). The last time the ‘deadline’ was issued in 1997, the tube well numbers doubled in the central Mexican province of Guanahuato (ibid). A leading Mexican practitioner of GwG concluded regulation would not work ‘unless social and economic realities are taken into account’ (Sandoval 2004).

Direct regulation of groundwater users through law is by far the most talked-about intervention in India. A model groundwater bill was formulated during the early 1970’s and revised versions have been tossed around since then. Since water is a state subject in India, the action lies with state governments; and few showed interest in formulating a groundwater law; and even fewer in enforcing it. The key problem is the transaction costs of enforcing such a law on millions of scattered borehole owners in the countryside. As the following table 3 shows, the organization of groundwater economy is a major determinant of what kind of regulatory action is appropriate. India withdraws twice as much groundwater as does the US but would have to enforce a groundwater law on 100 times more irrigators.


Senior Fellow, International Water Management Institute

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