Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia

Citation

Somanathan, E. (2010), "Taming the Anarchy: Groundwater Governance in South Asia", Indian Growth and Development Review, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 92-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538251011035909

Tushaar Shah is the pre‐eminent scholar of groundwater irrigation in India, and very likely anywhere in the world. This makes him the foremost researcher on irrigation in India because groundwater irrigation is far and away the most important kind in this country. A National Sample Survey of cultivators five years ago revealed that 69 per cent of kharif acreage and 76 per cent of rabi acreage was irrigated by wells and tubewells. Since the productivity of land irrigated by tubewells is a multiple of that of un‐irrigated land, and higher than that of land irrigated by canals, this means that most of India's agricultural output is dependent on groundwater.

Shah's book opens with a brief history of irrigation in South Asia. Irrigation in India underwent a revolution that began around 1970 when tubewell technology became sufficiently cheap and widely available that farmers began to invest in it. Shah does not mention the role of the Green Revolution package of improved seeds, fertilizer and pesticides in this transformation but they presumably played an important role in the adoption and spread of the tubewell. Yields from the new varieties respond much more to increases in water availability than did the older more drought‐resistant low‐yielding varieties.

While tubewell irrigation began with government promotion of government and cooperative tubewells, it really spread with its adoption by individual farmers. Small landholdings meant that it was not economical for all farmers in a region to invest in wells of their own. Instead, the richer farmers invested and sold water to their poorer neighbours. These groundwater markets have brought groundwater access to poorer farmers who do not have the capital to sink wells of their own.

Groundwater irrigation has proved to be a boon to farmers owing to its availability on demand, unlike the large bureaucratically administered gravity‐flow canal systems that dominated Indian irrigation. Even smaller and more flexible irrigation systems like the tanks of southern India or the ahar‐pyne systems of Bihar have crumbled under the superior flexibility and year‐round water availability offered by groundwater. A graph in the book shows that groundwater extraction in India has gone from 25 cubic kilometres per year in 1960 to over 260 cubic kilometres per year today. Multiple‐cropping made possible by this extraction has resulted in a huge increase in agricultural output. But anarchic extraction in the presence of externalities has given rise to problems of falling water tables, and quality deterioration. In some coastal areas of Gujarat, agriculture has been abandoned and whole villages have migrated.

Shah divides South Asia into three zones. Zone 1, consisting of Sindh, Pakistani Punjab, Nepal, Bangladesh and Orissa are areas where governments have stuck to metering electricity and charging farmers for it. This has resulted in a heavy reliance on diesel pumps. In Zone 2 (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh), the same effect has been achieved by subsidising electricity but allowing the distribution system in rural areas to collapse with obvious disastrous consequences for the rural economy. In Zone 3 (Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh), electricity is given to farmers at a flat‐rate per pump, resulting in an often ruinous race to the bottom of the aquifer. Farmers in Zone 3 have been too politically powerful for the withdrawal of the subsidies even though these have had a negative impact on industry and domestic consumers.

Having outlined these problems, Shah then goes on to criticize the solutions proposed to end them. The thrust of his argument here is that South Asia is too different from any other part of the world with the exception of the North China plain for lessons learned elsewhere to be easily applicable. There are over 20 million pump‐operators, so that transactions costs tend to overwhelm any attempts at regulation. In most other parts of the world, there are far fewer players to be dealt with. He also spends some time painting a generally negative picture of the outcomes of water governance reforms elsewhere in the world. I found this part of the book a little puzzling until I came to the conclusion that he was reacting to the infeasibility of top‐down proposals recommended by people who have not thought their proposals through and haven't engaged with the political and economic realities on the ground.

The book re‐pays a full reading because the author includes many case studies from different parts of the country illustrating the different conditions that prevail and that lead to different outcomes. For example, he shows that in the hard‐rock areas of peninsular India, there is considerable local support for mobilization around water‐harvesting and recharge schemes, while the same is not true for the alluvial aquifers of the north, even where they are water‐stressed as in the north‐west. He attributes this to the fact that the externalities are local in peninsular India where aquifers are confined, but are much more diffuse in the alluvial belt where there is really a single large aquifer.

No one who is concerned with water resource issues in India, or for that matter, no one who is concerned with the electricity sector should fail to read this book. It provides a panoramic view of the irrigation economy and polity of the subcontinent, and punctures naïve ideas of self‐governance and reform.

Having said that, I think that the author may be too sceptical about the possibility of re‐introducing metering and pricing of electricity. It is not at all clear that the path that most of India followed, that of abandoning metering, was, or is, inevitable. After all, metering persisted in all of our neighbouring countries. In the hard‐rock areas of southern India, vast resources have been thrown into competitive well‐deepening. Farmers themselves are aware of the trap they are in (Narendranath et al., 2005). So why should they not accept block cash grants in return for paying by the unit? Shah objects that with unit pricing of electricity, many farmers in these areas would have to leave farming. Many farmers would, however, love to leave farming anyway, as an NSS survey a few years ago highlighted. If they are paid to do so, they may jump at the chance. Of course, any such reform would need careful study, design and experimentation. But I do not believe it can be ruled out a priori.

If there is one weakness in the book, it is that the author does not pay sufficient attention to the consequences of the distortions in irrigation on the rest of the economy. The most important of these is the loss of financial viability of State Electricity Boards and the resultant chronic blackouts and power shortages that afflict industry. The non‐commercial operation of State Electricity Boards has resulted in a dysfunctional administration that will be very hard to cure unless revenue once again becomes the prime driver for management (Ruet, 2005). This is clearly one of the major bottlenecks that prevented India from developing a low‐cost manufacturing sector like China's. Yet the author appears to be hostile to the re‐introduction of metering in, for example, West Bengal where the state government has announced that that is its intention. Here, the author is persuaded that this will be to the detriment of poor farmers who will see the price of the water they buy rise. Again, it is not clear that this is in fact what will happen. If metering helps to put the State Electricity Board back in the black, this could improve power supply, thus allowing more farmers to switch to electricity from diesel. To call for free power in this situation leaves Shah open to the criticism that he is ignoring the reality that, in Eastern India, free power has always meant no power.

I think these criticisms come naturally to economists, and I believe Shah himself is aware of these issues, but other readers may be beguiled by the almost mystical tone into which the book occasionally slips while discussing the “organic evolution” of India's groundwater economy that is (in Chapter 8) “thriving in anarchy”. As Herbert Stein is said to have remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”. It would be well to keep this maxim in mind when thinking about the future of our groundwater economy.