Abstract: 55% of India’s agricultural land is rainfed and highly vulnerable to rainfall variability. Investment in protective irrigation is vital to make rainfed crops resilient to monsoon dry spells. There is significant public investment in irrigation, but it tends to be motivated by the goal of increasing productivity rather than equity concerns. As a result, public investments are skewed towards supporting irrigators more than addressing the vulnerability of rainfed farmers. In this talk, I motivate why equity considerations are important in guiding irrigation investments. While there are many classical theories of equity, I explore a grounded understanding of equity through the case of the borewell pooling programme in Andhra Pradesh. Hundreds of farmer collectives have been formed by the organisation WASSAN in partnership with the AP government, in which borewell-owning farmers share water from their wells with the non-borewell-owning farmers through a pipeline network to enable protective irrigation of rainfed crops up to three times during monsoon dry spells. This is part of their formalised agreement, which also mandates that farmers do not dig any new borewells within the collective. I present an in-depth study of one such collective and analyse how the intervention reshaped access to water since the collective was formed more than 15 years ago. The study leaves us with new questions about the trade-offs among equity, efficiency, and sustainability, which further guide this ongoing research.
Speaker Bio-sketch: Dr Pooja Prasad is an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi. Her research interests are in land and water management for livelihood security and resource sustainability, with a focus on the semi-arid regions of India and Africa. She is especially interested in data, governance and policy related questions of how common pool resources may be managed to achieve equity, sustainability and resilience to risks. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, she was a postdoc at IHE Delft in the Netherlands. Pooja has a PhD from CTARA, IIT Bombay, a Master’s degree from Stanford University and a B.Tech. from IIT Bombay. Profile: https://web.iitd.ac.in/~p_pooja/