Bringing pumps to people

Giving the poor better access to groundwater irrigation: Sustainable approaches and options for eastern India.

What can States in eastern India learn from the tube-well programs created in eastern Uttar Pradesh and north Bihar?

The State government has a vital role to play in developing groundwater resources to help improve the lot of the poorest people in eastern India’s rural communities. Many States have tried to achieve this over the past 50 years through centrally planned public tube-well programs. Recently published research says that most of these efforts have failed to bring irrigation—or improved livelihoods—to the poor.

This research shows how policy makers can have a significant positive impact on poverty reduction by removing pump subsidies and opening pump markets to international competition. Subsidies and import restrictions have kept pump prices in India artificially inflated, by more than 35–45%, over those of neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

If a ‘shock therapy’ approach of removing restrictions is too drastic or politically difficult, the next best option is to use market mechanisms to manage pump subsidy and loan programs for the poor. A good example of this approach is the jointly managed subsidy programs that have helped usher in eastern India’s belated Green Revolution. Here local pump dealers are active participants in the management of pump subsidy programs, alongside government and nationalized banks. The examples of eastern Uttar Pradesh and north Bihar provide working models of such approaches.

In much of eastern India, the development of groundwater for irrigation is confirmed as the key to improving the lives of poor people on a massive scale. Examples abound of how the introduction of small pumps has energized agrarian economies by allowing people to grow food and cash crops, creating new income streams for millions of households. If this is the case, then why have the public tube-well programs of eastern India—so enthusiastically supported by donors over five decades—been such resounding failures?

The answer lies in the gap in the perspective between institutional thinking and the reality of life at the village level. Most public tube-well initiatives in eastern India have been strangled by bureaucracy and the local political dynamic. In these programs, the government was responsible for centrally controlling activities that are best done by farmers in a decentralized mode—managing and operating irrigation wells.

In the 1930s, public tube-well programs played the useful role of introducing these technologies when farmers resisted using it. Today, the situation is quite different. But public tube-well programs have failed to reinvent themselves and address the needs of the current market and society they serve. Small-scale, farmer-managed tube wells and decentralized pump irrigation markets, have made public tube wells largely irrelevant. It is no surprise, then, that governments in most economically dynamic states, such as Gujarat, have begun turning over government tube wells to farmer groups in a hurry.

Eastern India’s poverty can be reduced by putting pumps in the hands of the small farmer. But the sheer numbers of people are such that a market push is needed to speed the process of transforming this region’s vast groundwater irrigation potential into wealth and welfare for its poor population. Central and State government pump subsidy and loan programs were created to speed the process. But they are mired in bureaucratic procedure and compromised by political brinkmanship and rent seeking. The end result is that these initially well-intentioned efforts have failed to produce an impact.

The bright spot in this story is the successful programs of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and north Bihar. Here much of the practical organization of the pump subsidy and loan programs has been released from the stranglehold of the local bureaucracy. The private pump dealer plays a central coordinating role.

Motivated by the prospect of profits from the growing pump market, private dealers have proliferated in towns of eastern UP. Intense competition has induced these businesses to deliver small farmers a range of rapid and useful services that were never previously offered.

To get the farmers’ business, these pump dealers do the paper work and legwork, get the clearances and approvals needed. They organize bank loans, arrange the issuing of pipes, pumps and the drilling of boreholes—all in an unusually short time as compared with a centrally coordinated approach. The average delivery time for a working pump set under the government’s Free Boring Scheme in eastern UP is one-to-two weeks. In other States, dealers extract a heavy ‘service charge’ from farmers for providing these services. But the intense competition in the UP region has reduced dealer margins to 7–10% from 15–18% elsewhere.

The government’s role is to support this market-oriented approach by encouraging the creation of these types of public-private partnerships. The government’s key role is to set market rules that allow suppliers to deliver fast service and pump equipment adapted to local farmers’ needs.

The central lesson is that removing pump subsidies and opening up imports is the best strategy to create welfare for the poor in this region. If this approach is not possible, the research suggests a five-point strategy that water development planners can draw from when crafting their groundwater and poverty reduction policies in eastern India.

1. Cease Public and Community Tube- Well and Minor Irrigation Programs

The critical challenge of minor irrigation development—and, indeed, of overall agrarian growth—in eastern India is to increase the region’s current pump density of 1–3 pumps/100 hectares of net sown area to 25–40. This requires programs whose primary goal is to put the pump into the hands of the poor.

But rather than attacking this problem directly, much of eastern India is still busy building new public tube wells and big community-managed river lift irrigation schemes that the rest of India stopped doing 15 years ago. North Bengal—which does not need deep tube wells and buried pipeline technology—has continued to deploy them.

With the deluge of studies and evaluations that testify to the failure of public tube-well programs in eastern Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere in India, the need to stop support for these types of programs should now be a well-accepted fact. Current practice shows that this has not yet happened. In many states today, new programs—mostly donor-supported—continue to fund group-owned and -managed minor irrigation or to rehabilitate the infrastructure.

One example is a study of government-managed lift irrigation schemes in Orissa. It reveals that these schemes irrigate an average of 18.2 acres and collect irrigation fees of Rs3,550. At a total cost of Rs200,000/ hectare to build, the economics of this approach seems destined to be perpetually unviable.

In many eastern Indian states, government departments are directly involved in tube-well programs at a level that is most logically the farmer’s business. These administrations are installing small tube wells of the type that private farmers operate, using a bureaucratic structure that does not even cover operators’ salaries.

This is not to say that centrally managed tube-well irrigation schemes are all bad. Systems with large group tube wells with buried pipelines are doing well in north Gujarat and Maharashtra where farmers have money and enterprise but not groundwater. In contrast, north Bengal’s farmers have too much water but no pump capital, so collective management of lift irrigation systems is neither necessary nor worthwhile. What will help these farmers the most is rapid access to small pumps and a system that helps them finance their pump’s installation. The correct minor irrigation strategy for Gujarat is clearly a wrong approach for areas such as North Bengal.

2. Take a Strategic Approach to Rural Electricity Supply and Pricing

The critical relationship between rural electricity supply and the development of eastern India’s agricultural economy needs to be recognized. There are several determining factors. First, electricity is cheaper than diesel. Second, electric pump engines are cleaner. And third, as hydroelectric plants generate more than 50% of eastern UP’s electricity, it makes good sense to promote electric power for the region’s agricultural development.

High tariffs on electricity for agricultural use in eastern India have motivated millions of smallholder farmers, since the 1980s, to switch from electric pumps to the cheaper diesel-powered groundwater pumps.

The new investments needed to improve and extend power supply in rural areas—and ultimately attract the diesel pump users to switch back to electricity—are unlikely to come about without exploring radically new ways of pricing rural power. Current research and thinking offer little insight into how this can best be achieved. A standard solution advocated by most analysts and institutions such as the World Bank is to reintroduce metered electricity supply. But this proposal overlooks the huge transaction costs involved in metering power supply to the several million farmers who would turn to electric pumps if the power supply environment were to improve.
The central issue then is to reduce metering and collection costs by drastically reducing the number of power supply points that the State Electricity Board directly monitors and bills. Several options exist:

• One idea worth exploring is a variation on the concept of electricity cooperatives that saw widespread success in the rural United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. This approach has also worked in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh though not very successfully.
• A variation on this is currently being tested in Orissa as part of this state’s power-sector reforms. A more distant alternative is inviting Gram Panchayats (Village Councils) to undertake the distribution of power within the village and collect electricity dues by offering an attractive commission on the fees collected. This should not be difficult as the State Electricity Board’s (SEB) own transaction costs of metered power supply may be as high as 45–50% of overall operating costs including transmission and distribution losses. Efficient Panchayats can then transform electricity retailing into an income-generating proposition.
• Yet another alternative is to work with private power- distribution contractors—who will be charged based on consumption recorded in a central SEB meter and who can sell power to individual retail users.
• The prepaid electricity card might be another important mechanism for serving and ‘metering’ the con-sumption of a large number of small users over a vast geographical area. The South African electricity utility, Eskom, is using prepaid electricity cards to reduce the transaction costs of serving a dispersed rural customer base. And this is precisely the same challenge that Indian electricity distribution boards face.

For the power supplier, prepaid cards drastically reduce the cost of metering and charge collection. For users, it offers a practical and transparent way to plan and track their electricity consumption. Prepaid card systems are expensive to put in place for small numbers of users. But for the large volumes that rural power consumers in India use, this approach is quite affordable. Broad user acceptance will be ensured if the SEBs transfer part of their savings to users and invest in improving the quality of power supply.

3. Improve Energy Efficiency in Pump Irrigation

Some 30–35% of the energy actually used by irrigation pumping can be saved by modifying pump sets. Against the maximum achievable efficiency of 54% for electric pump sets and 20% for diesel pump sets, observed efficiencies are sometimes as low as 13% and 5%, respectively. There are two common reasons: the subsidized flat electricity tariff; and farmers’ lack of knowledge of how to select the right pump for the job, to operate and maintain it.

S.M. Patel, an agricultural engineer based in Ahmedabad, has pioneered thousands of pump rectification experiments throughout India. His work shows that simply replacing a pump’s foot valve and suction pipe increases the water output of diesel pumps by 30%. But full-scale pump rectification—involving appropriately matched foot-valve, suction pipe, delivery pipe, pump and engine—can increase the discharge of a diesel pump by 85% and cut diesel consumption/hour by 17%.

Some Netherlands-supported experiments in north Bengal registered significant gains in energy efficiency by removing the restrictor and attaching a ‘thermo-syphon’ cooling system, reducing the engine speed and removing the check valve (or foot-valve in case of dug wells). Tests showed that this type of rectification can cut diesel consumption by half and improve discharge improved by more than 15%. What’s more, while the full rectification program recommended by S.M. Patel may cost nearly Rs8,000 for diesel pumps, the modifications piloted in the north Bengal project cost all of Rs350.

Impact of modifications on fuel efficiency of diesel pumps: Test results in north Bengal Terai Development Project (static suction head in shallow tube wells: 3.5 m)
Modification	Discharge (l/s)	Diesel consumption (l/h)	Cumulative Improvement (%)
Unmodified	8.6	0.8	-
Raising cooling water temp. from 35 °C to 75 °C	8.6	0.78	13
Removing check valve	10.5	0.76	31
Reducing engine speed from 1,470 to 1,100 rpm	10.3	0.55	51
Source: NBTDP 1996:4.

Many agencies have promoted programs for pump rectification, with mixed results. One important reason for this is that farmers are unable to meet the exacting conditions of maintenance, repair and access to spare parts that are required to achieve high fuel efficiency.

The reasons to persist with the pump rectification programs are compelling. Existing programs are driven primarily by the goal of energy efficiency, but pollution reduction is a relevant secondary benefit. Owners of rectified pumps are more competitive, as they can charge a lower price for water they sell to poor farmers, as pumps use less diesel per hour of operation.

Looking at a potential real-life situation in a local water market, a group of owners of rectified diesel pumps enjoys a powerful competitive advantage over owners of unmodified equipment. The former will provide water to local buyers at a doubly reduced cost-per-unit of water. This situation will generate market pressure to encourage the other diesel pump owners to rectify their pump sets to remain competitive.

4. Promote Appropriately Sized Diesel Pumps

Different types of water sources—canal and river water, deep wells, and shallow dug wells—require different types of pumps to irrigate most optimally. But the current Indian pump market does not provide the entire spectrum of pumps required for all farmers’ pumping needs.

Shallow tube wells and dug wells in the Ganga basin cannot use all the power of a 5-horsepower (hp) engine because the suction head is very low and because, at full revolutions per minute, it uses only some 2–2.5 hp. The Indian pump industry has not effectively promoted anything smaller than a 5-hp diesel engine to drive an irrigation pump.

Only two manufacturers—Greves Cotton and Sriram Honda offer a 1.98-hp diesel/kerosene pump, which is popular in parts of the Chhotanagpur plateau. It is difficult to find pumps of this size elsewhere in the region. The key reason, it seems, is that the small pumps neither offer a significant price advantage compared to the 5-hp pumps nor are particularly fuel-efficient, as are some of the small Chinese pumps used in Bangladesh.

If the barriers on the import of micro-diesel pumps of less than 5-hp are lifted, small farmers—especially those on the Indian side of the Ganga basin—would probably have taken to them in large numbers, as have the Bangladeshi farmers.

5. Reform Pump-Subsidy Schemes

India’s eastern states need a drastic reform of their pump-subsidy and credit schemes if they are to succeed in their goal of giving needy farmers better access to groundwater for irrigation.

With more than 30% of India’s rural poor and 30% of its groundwater resources, the region accessed only 7% of NABARD’s minor irrigation refinance funds, due to bureaucratic formalities. This poor uptake of the schemes does not reflect a lack of need or demand for the subsidy, nor does it reflect NABARD’s unwillingness to push credit for tube wells in eastern India. Above all, it reflects the difficulty, hassle and transaction costs of accessing pump subsidy and loan schemes as they are designed and operated by state governments.

In north Bengal, members of the ruling political class hold a monopoly on the subsidy and use it as patronage to command and strengthen allegiance and political support. As this objective does not fit those of nationalized banks and NABARD, these institutions have reduced their participation.

In Orissa, the subsidy scheme is effectively controlled by a monopoly, which has skimmed the bulk of the subsidy by over-costing. This has resulted in a weak ‘demand pull’ from farmers to participate in this loan-subsidy scheme.

Eastern Uttar Pradesh has diffused this monopoly structure by allowing open market competition between a number of dealers, creating a win-win situation for all players. Dealers increase their sales and market share and the Free Boring Scheme gives them a powerful instrument to do brisk business. Banks are happy because dealers share the responsibility of recovering the loans. Staff in relevant government and bank offices enjoy the fact that their total rents are large (though the piece rate is lower). And farmers are supremely happy because for a small sewa-shulk (service charge) dealers give them red carpet treatment and deliver their tube wells inside of 10 days.

Research that lies behind this Briefing and a number of related studies suggest that removing the pump subsidy altogether is the best way to deliver pumps to poor communities faster. These studies show that pump prices in India would fall by 30-40% if pump subsidies are removed and free import of Chinese pumps is allowed. In Pakistan, which meets both these conditions, pumps are sold for 35-40% less than in India.