Date:November 19 (Thu.), 2009 15:00 -
Venue:Middle size meeting room (Room No. 332) on the third floor of Inamori Memorial Hall
Speaker: Prof. Nareppa Nagaraj, CSEAS Visiting Research Fellow from
University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore
Title:Water Crisis in Peninsular India: Innovative Approaches and Policy Imperatives
Abstract:
Irrigation has a prime role in Indian agriculture offering food security
to meet the needs of an ever growing population. Of late, the growth in
the surface irrigated area has stagnated and declined. And, the area
under ground water irrigation has increased massively leading to
overexploitation. Facilitating policies towards electricity, credit,
technological innovations in well exploration, extraction and use,
demographic shifts, lucrative product markets and weak groundwater
institutions are contributing to the over-extraction of groundwater. For
the past four decades, groundwater extraction has exhibited a trajectory
of initial utilization, agrarian boom, growing scarcity and eventually
bust with a rapid fall in the groundwater table in semi-arid regions of
India. This has forced several farmers to shift to dryland agriculture
as they could not bear the brunt of failure of wells increasing economic
scarcity of the precious groundwater resource for irrigation. The
ineffective institutional efforts of the government to contain
groundwater overdraft have proved in vain. The challenge is thus to
frame effective institutions focusing on resource management rather than
resource development. In this endeavor, this study critically examines
trends in the growth of irrigation covering 1). the trajectory of well
irrigation, 2). the degree of over exploitation, 3). causes and the
consequences of groundwater depletion, 4). the management gaps and the
appropriate institutional, 5). technical and corrective policy
instruments to overcome the water crisis taking into account both demand
and supply side issues. Further, this study show that groundwater
management approaches which are effective in one country may not be
effective or viable in another country due to the variation in type of
aquifers, the number of users involved, alternative sources of water and
the political economy at large.