Assessing potential of water rights and energy pricing in making groundwater use for irrigation sustainable in India

Abstract

Groundwater emerged as a major source of irrigation in India during the mid-1970s. However, a large expansion in well irrigation due to a massive rural electrification programme, government policies of promoting private tube well construction and large subsidies on electricity for agricultural use resulted in groundwater over-abstraction in many semi-arid and arid regions of India. In addition, most of the direct and indirect measures to regulate groundwater use have met with little success and have been largely ineffective in arresting groundwater over-exploitation. This paper reviews the institutional and market-based instruments that are now being advocated by scholars and practitioners as potential instruments for sustainable groundwater use. The review mainly focuses on research that examined the viability and impacts of establishing private and tradable water rights in groundwater and pro rata pricing of electricity for irrigation use as instruments to arrest the problems of groundwater over-exploitation in India.

Farm Typology in the Berambadi Watershed (India): Farming Systems Are Determined by Farm Size and Access to Groundwater

“…The development of borewells observed in the Berambadi watershed since the 1970s also occurred in other parts of India, especially in other hard-rock aquifer areas such as Madhya Pradesh, were the number of borewells increased by nearly eleven times from 1986 to 2001 [53]. This trend generated a high density of borewells that caused them to interfere with each other [18].…”

“…This trend generated a high density of borewells that caused them to interfere with each other [18]. Borewell interference occurs when a borewell's area of influence comes into contact with or overlaps that of a neighboring borewell [18,53]. Borewell interference may be one reason for the high percentage of borewell failures.…”

“…Borewell interference may be one reason for the high percentage of borewell failures. Borewell failure is often due to failure in identifying the exact water-bearing zones or aquifers, which is common in hard-rock regions in India [53,54]. Results showed that technological developments increased borewell depth over the past 10 years in the Berambadi watershed.…”

Enabling policy environment for water, food and energy security

“…Electricity pricing and metering: Subsidized and unmetered tariff of electricity supply to agriculture has led to an excessive energy and ground water use in many countries, but a better quality of power supply and metering in combination with increased unit pricing, can conserve groundwater (Bassi, 2014;Kumar, 2016). In the 1980s in the Barind region of Bangladesh, farmers with few resources were only able to grow a single crop and had no access to groundwater.…”

Irrigation water pricing policies and water resources management

“…Power tariff changes influence groundwater use efficiency and productivity positively (Kumar, 2005). It is worth mentioning here that the number of groundwater wells in India increased from about 100,000 in 1960 to about 12 million in 2006 (Bassi, 2014). Since pumps on the deepest tube wells are predominantly electric, 85% of the groundwater pumping energy is provided by electricity (Dharmadhikary et al, 2018).…”