Pampered views and parrot talks – In the cause of well irrigation in India – A paper by Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy

 It is widely held that surface irrigation is becoming increasingly irrelevant in India’s irrigation landscape in spite of increased investments, and therefore future investments in irrigation should be diverted for well irrigation.

The key questions being investigated in this paper are –

• Can well irrigation alone sustain expansion in India’s irrigated area or in India’s water resource-water demand scenario, is canal irrigation substitutable by well irrigation?
• Is surface irrigation really inefficient?
• Does the declining area under canal irrigation mean negative returns on investments in surface irrigation systems?
• Can local rainwater harvesting and recharge arrest groundwater depletion and sustain well irrigation economy?
• Can well irrigation boost agricultural growth and alleviate rural poverty in water abundant east India?

The article makes the following arguments –

• The inherent advantages of surface irrigation over well irrigation such as higher dependability of the system and the ability to effectively address spatial mismatch in resource availability and demand, means the second one is not a substitute for the first one.
• The use of outdated irrigation management concepts which treat ‘drainage’ as waste leads to underassessment of efficiency of surface systems.
• Sustaining well irrigation in semi arid and arid regions would need ‘imported surface water’ rather than local runoff for recharging.
• The use of simple statistics of ‘area irrigated’ to pass judgements about performance of surface irrigation systems is sheer misuse of statistics because of two reasons -
  • Gravity irrigation is just one of the many functions of large surface systems; and
  • There are complex hydrological processes adversely affecting the performance, which are beyond the institutional capacity of irrigation agencies to control.

Finally, it is fallacious to argue that well irrigation alone can boost agricultural growth and reduce poverty in eastern India as it has very low per capita arable land, and offers low marginal returns from irrigation owing to humidity and high rainfall.

The paper can be downloaded below -