Development and the Environment

Badiani, Reena; Jessoe, Katrina; Plant, Suzanne

doi:10.1177/1070496512442507

Cited by 78 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…India, the world's largest user of groundwater, and the country perhaps most dependent on this resource, provides a stark example. Groundwater is unregulated, and even electricity for pumping is highly subsidized, mostly unpriced, and even where it is priced, charges are mostly flat and independent of actual usage (Badiani et al 2012, Fishman et al 2014. As a result, incentives for conservation and efficiency are lacking.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Part of the logic behind this subsidy program is the hope that the adoption of water saving technologies can reduce groundwater extraction and stabilize water tables (Dhawan 2000). However, groundwater is seldom regulated or even priced in India, and even the electricity used for pumping is heavily subsidized and often priced at a flat tariff, if at all (Badiani et al 2012, Fishman et al 2014. The absence of monetary incentives to save water may therefore potentially undermine the effectiveness of this approach, but this point seems to be absent from discussions of this policy (Narayanamoorthy 2004).…”

Section: The Indian Groundwater Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Can improved agricultural water use efficiency save India’s groundwater?

Fishman

Devineni

Raman

2015

Environ. Res. Lett.

141

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Irrigated agriculture is placing increasing pressure on finite freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, where water extraction is often unregulated, un-priced and even subsidized. To shift agriculture to a more sustainable use of water without harming the food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholders, substantial improvements of water use efficiency will be required. Here, we use detailed hydroclimatic and agricultural data to estimate the potential for the widespread adoption of efficient irrigation technologies to halt the depletion of India's groundwater resources. Even though we find substantial technical potential for reversing water table declines, we show that the impacts are highly sensitive to assumptions about farmers' water use decisions. For example, we find that widespread adoption of proven technologies that include drip and sprinkler irrigation has the potential to reduce the amount of excessive extraction of groundwater by two thirds. However, under more realistic assumptions about farmers' irrigation choices, half of these reductions are lost due to the expansion of irrigated area. Our results suggest that without the introduction of incentives for conservation, much of the potential impact of technology adoption on aquifers may be lost. The analysis provides quantitative input to the debate of incentive versus technology based water policies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Indian Groundwater Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

Can improved agricultural water use efficiency save India’s groundwater?

Fishman

Devineni

Raman

2015

Environ. Res. Lett.

141

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“…Free or flatly tariffed electricity provisions have played a critical role in enabling groundwater extraction [48] and might further contribute to UGW use if present day irrigation and cropping practices persist. However, despite the presence of subsidies, expensive pump technology is still needed to draw groundwater once levels drop beyond certain thresholds [49].…”

Section: Impacts Of Climate Change On Ugw Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invisible water, visible impact: groundwater use and Indian agriculture under climate change

Zaveri

Grogan

Fisher‐Vanden

et al. 2016

Environ. Res. Lett.

166

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India is one of the world's largest food producers, making the sustainability of its agricultural system of global significance. Groundwater irrigation underpins India's agriculture, currently boosting crop production by enough to feed 170 million people. Groundwater overexploitation has led to drastic declines in groundwater levels, threatening to push this vital resource out of reach for millions of small-scale farmers who are the backbone of India's food security. Historically, losing access to groundwater has decreased agricultural production and increased poverty. We take a multidisciplinary approach to assess climate change challenges facing India's agricultural system, and to assess the effectiveness of large-scale water infrastructure projects designed to meet these challenges. We find that even in areas that experience climate change induced precipitation increases, expansion of irrigated agriculture will require increasing amounts of unsustainable groundwater. The large proposed national river linking project has limited capacity to alleviate groundwater stress. Thus, without intervention, poverty and food insecurity in rural India is likely to worsen.

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“…In the majority of developing countries, including India, water pricing is a difficult issue to tackle. As electricity is subsidized for farmers [27], the pumping of water using bore wells is common. Effectively, the farmers pay for the pumping costs, and not the value of the water itself [28].…”

Section: Decision-makers and Optionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Insights into the Cauvery River Dispute in India

2020

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For hundreds of years, conflicts in water sharing have existed all around the globe. Cauvery River, in the southern part of India, has been in the midst of such conflict for the last 130 years. Historically, the conflict has been about the right to use water and the states/provinces in conflict have used the water from the river for agricultural purposes. Due to industrialization in the late 1980s and increasing population, water availability in the region has become stressed. Climate change has exacerbated the region's water availability issues. Faltering rainfall has caused unrest in the region, and the traditional methods of water sharing are dwindling under political pressure. Without a climate change strategy, the governments of these states will never be able to solve this complex issue at hand. The Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) is applied to understand the nuances of this conflict. It models the preferences of the decision-makers (the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka) and the common option (goal) they can reach to potentially solve the conflict. Fuzzy preferences along with option prioritization is also applied to this conflict in order to account for the uncertainties in the decision-makers' preferences. The purpose of this paper is to nudge decision-makers in a productive direction to overcome the long-impending political standoff, while introducing a new methodology of looking into this old conflict.

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Development and the Environment

Cited by 78 publications

References 38 publications

Can improved agricultural water use efficiency save India’s groundwater?

Can improved agricultural water use efficiency save India’s groundwater?

Invisible water, visible impact: groundwater use and Indian agriculture under climate change

Strategic Insights into the Cauvery River Dispute in India

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