IWMI-TATA Publications

Wastewater irrigaon is not new in Maharashtra and the Government of Maharashtra as well as farmers are beginning to recognize its value as a drought response. This Highlight presents a synthesis of eld exploraons in 11 locaons in Maharashtra which cover the extent of wastewater irrigaon; economics of wastewater and freshwater use; farmersapos; preferences and percepons about wastewater; and how they are adapng to its use in agriculture.

As a cold desert with extreme climate and limited precipitaon, Ladakh struggles to meet its irrigaon requirements. In recent years, a historical pracce of graing glaciers and a new innovave technique of building apos;ice stupaapos; has helped communies improve irrigaon access and extend the crop calendar. This Highlight looks at how combining sound science with credible local knowledge is helping people improve climate resilience.

This report covers phase 2 of the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Research Program (ITP) for the period 2006-2010. The major areas of action: Research focusing on water sector issues concerning underprivileged communities and backward regions in the country; Idea-incubation for livelihoods enhancement efforts using water as a central input, supporting the Trust in their water sector partnerships; Dissemination and raising public awareness; Widening the network of research partners; Policy influencing.

Recognising the importance of watershed development as a strategy of rural development, both central and state governments, non-governmental organisations, International Development Agencies invest huge funds on watershed development. The watershed approach enables the planners to internalize such externalities and other linkages among agricultural and related activities. Experience shows that various watershed development programme brought significant positive impact. Impact evaluations contribute to improve the effectiveness of policies and programs. Different methodologies have been used in the evaluation literature mainly the qualitative and quantitative methods. Choosing appropriate methodology for impact assessment of natural resource management interventions is essential. This bulletin outlines the various concepts and methods in watershed impact evaluation with examples. The use of economic surplus approach with consumer and producers’ surplus is compared with the conventional approach with only producers’ surplus. Also incorporation of the rainfall variability in the watershed evaluation is demonstrated. A simple computer based watershed programme incorporating the various components of the watershed development is also developed and included.

Since the 1850s, the Krishna basin has seen an increasing mobilization of its water resources and a dramatic development of irrigation, with little regard to the limits of available water resources. This progressively led to the closure of the basin: surface water resources are now almost entirely committed to human consumptive uses; the increasing groundwater abstraction negatively affects the surface water balance by decreasing base flows, and the discharge to the ocean continues to decrease. The lower Krishna basin, located in Andhra Pradesh, is a deficit sub-basin; it depends highly on inflow from the upper basin and on upstream water uses. It is the first part of the Krishna basin to face the adverse consequences of any hydrological changes. It is also the region of the basin where most of the available water is depleted by human consumptive uses. In times of drought, it is the first region to face severe water shortages and to witness a spatial re-distribution or re-appropriation of water. Taking place on the basis of current political, institutional and geographical forces, this re-appropriation of water raises socio-political questions of sectoral and regional water apportionment within the lower Krishna basin and may be at the origin of conflicts between water users. This paper identifies two main drivers to the lower Krishna basin closure: (i) a long-term trend towards decreasing water availability with a declining surface water inflow due to water development in the upper basin and (ii) a local water over-commitment due to uncontrolled development of private groundwater abstraction and short term management decisions, both at the farmer and command area levels, in the large irrigation projects of the lower Krishna basin. In 1996/2000, 80% of the lower Krishna basin net inflow was depleted and discharge to the ocean amounted to 17.9 km3/yr, defining a moderately modified ecosystem. During the drought of 2001/2004, likely to forecast the future waterscape of the lower Krishna basin, all indicators point to further water resource commitment with a depleted fraction amounting to 98% of the net inflow, a lack of discharge to the ocean and the shrinkage of surface irrigated agriculture. This paper illustrates that local users and managers participate to a large extent in the shifting waterscape of the lower Krishna basin. At the basin scale, this paper shows that both the intra-agriculture and the inter- sectoral distribution of water are being reshaped. In the agricultural sector, the strong political divide among the three regions of Andhra Pradesh and the need to balance rural development among those regions are two of the main driving forces of a shifting agricultural water use. If surface water distribution among large irrigation projects tends to be to the advantage of the politically influent coastal region; the uncontrolled groundwater development mainly benefits the dry upland regions of Telangana and Rayalaseema and is tantamount t

Research comment on report of the National Commission on Integrated Water Resources Development (NCIWRD) titled “Integrated water resource development: A plan for action.”

IIMI-TATA comment based on a draft report titled “Community management of groundwater resources in rural India.”

Research highlight based on a PhD thesis titled “The dark zone: Groundwater irrigation, politics and social power in North Gujarat.”

Research highlight based on a paper titled “Understanding scientific controversies: The case of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).”

Based on a paper titled “Comparative management performance of government and farmer managed irrigation systems.”

Research highlight based on a paper titled “Groundwater markets promoting efficiency in water use in agriculture in Karnataka.”

Research highlight based on a paper titled “The blue and green water use and productivity in agriculture: Study from Narmada River Basin, Madhya Pradesh, India.”

Research highlight based on a paper titled ”The nature of India’s water economy: Fitting institutions and policies to the context.”

In the classical model of irrigation efficiency, all water applied to the crop is treated as consumed or lost while the integrated basin view of irrigation efficiency views only the effective evapo-transpiration as the consumptive use in irrigation. In either case, increased water efficiency at farm/individual level would not lead to water saving at the system (basin) level unless these higher farm efficiencies are achieved system-wide! Thus, unless the adoption of micro-irrigation is scaled up, it would not make any significant contribution to alleviating the problem of groundwater depletion and in resolving various related issues. Even after more than three decades of promotion by various government and non-government agencies, the spread of micro-irrigation in India is miniscule. The limited growth of micro-irrigation technologies in India can, to a large extent, be explained by the apparent gap between what ha s been marketed and where the demand lies. This paper tries to understand the adoption, spread, impacts, market dynamics and constraints of micro-irrigation technologies through an extensive review of literature and by capturing recent development in the field to derive conclusions and implications for promotion of these technologies, especially among the poor.

Research highlight based on a paper titled Alternative irrigation institutions in canal-command: the case of Chalakkudy River Diversion Scheme in Kerala, South India

Research highlight based on a paper titled Response to provate initiative for water recharge: Case of Duhada Village, Amreli District

Research highlight based on a paper titled Community intermediation in rural power Distribution

Research highlight based on a paper titled Groundwater socio-ecology of South Asia: An overview of issues and evidence

Research highlight based on a paper titled Impact of irrigation on agricultural growth and poverty alleviation: Macro level analyses in India

Research highlight based on a paper titled Understanding underdevelopment: Characterizing regional development in Vidarbha with special focus on water use

Research highlight based on a paper titled Irrigation development and rural poverty in Gujarat, India: A disaggregated analysis

Research highlight based on a paper titled Groundwater development and agriculture production: A comparative study of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal

Research highlight based on a paper titled Impact of participatory irrigation management on tribals in South Gujarat

Research highlight based on a paper titled Issues in energy-irrigation nexux: An overview

Research highlight based on a paper titled Pumping behaviour under different tariff regimes: The Anand survey

Research highlight based on a paper titled Micro management of water in North Gujarat: Issues, prospects and directions for future

Research highlight based on a paper titled Poverty, gender and water issues in irrigation agriculture and irrigation institutions: A review of literature

Research highlight based on a paper titled quot;Energy pricing and supply for groundwater demand management: Lessons from Mexican agriculturequot;,; Paper presented in the Policy Dialog on Forward Thinking Policies for Groundwater Management: Energy, water resources and economic approaches, New Delhi, 2-6 September 2002.

Research highlight based on a paper titled Irrigation management transfer: GWRDCs Tubewell Transfer Programme in Gujarat

Research highlight based on a paper titled Who should manage the tanks: Irrigation department, users organization, or private management agency? A quest to find a sustainable solution.

In the arid and semi-arid Indian state of Rajasthan, tanks and ponds have been a mainstay of rural communities for centuries. This paper assesses a rehabilitation strategy proposed for 1200 large tanks. It argues that treating tanks only as flow irrigation systems is very likely to result in a flawed strategy. As the experience of NGOs work shows, Rajasthan’s tanks belong more to the watershed development domain than to the irrigation domain and a strategy that views tanks as multi-use socio-ecological constructs, and which recognizes varied stakeholder groups is more likely to enhance the social value of tanks.

AB Provision of irrigation has been thought to be crucial in improving the livelihoods of millions of tribals in Central belt of India, who are locked in perpetual poverty. Green Revolution Technology, which has been at the heart of India’s agricultural development, has more or less bypassed the tribal population. For one, irrigation infrastructure is inadequate in the tribal regions and again when irrigation infrastructure is made available, the tribals do not seem to make adequate use of them. Creating demand for irrigation among the tribal farmers seems to be most important challenge. It is in this backdrop that we undertook our case study in a tribal dominated block of Gujarat. Unlike the other tribal dominated areas Jharkhand and Chattisgarh), the tribals in our study area were third generation farmers and therefore they faced no cognitive barriers in adopting irrigated agriculture. They are also as skilled a farmer as any other, which is reflected by the fact that there are no discernable yield differences between a tribal and a non-tribal farmer. We studied four canal irrigation schemes, which have been all turned over to the farmers at the behest of AKRSP (I)’s intervention. All these four schemes are tribal dominated, some of them are completely so, others have a handful of non-tribal population. The schemes we studied were Pingot RBMC, Baldeva LBMC, Pingot LBMC and Issar Minor Irrigation scheme. Our results confirm that irrigated agriculture has brought about tremendous benefits to a tribal farmer in the form of yield increases, higher cropping intensity, lower out migration and higher wage rates within the village. The trajectory of change for a typical tribal farming has been from cultivating local paddy in Kharif and migrating in Rabi and summer to cultivating hybrid paddy in kharif and irrigated groundnut or moong in summer. Irrigated agriculture has become central to their livelihoods and this in part explains why Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) has been more or less successful here. However, the non-tribal farmers have benefited more from PIM than tribal farmers, because they shifted to very lucrative sugarcane farming. The non-tribals (Patels) have also played a significant role in these irrigation co-operatives in that they have provided the much needed “demonstration effect” of profitability of irrigated agriculture. AKRSP (I)’s role as facilitator of PIM in Pingot RBMC and Baldeva LBMC has been acclaimed nationally. But we propose that the success of these two schemes lies in the creation of Pingot LBMC society, where tribal farmers came forward on their own and formed irrigation society to take over management of the canal system. The very fact that an all-tribal farmer group could successfully replicate PIM experiment in Gujarat that was started with Pingot RBMC and Baldeva LBMC is a proof enough for the success of PIM as a whole. We also propose that in the long term, the sustainability of PIM will depend on the o

Power sector reform in Orissa has not brought the desired results. The major reasons are over-expectations, incomplete and incorrect information about the sector at the beginning of the reform process in a short time span, financial constraints, poor employee discipline, government apathy and economic downturn. An all out effort needs to be made by the government, distribution companies, regulatory authority, media, body politic and public at large to improve the health of the distribution system, for in it lies the success of reform.