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Journal ArticleDOI

Political economy of the energy-groundwater nexus in India: exploring issues and assessing policy options

10 Jan 2012-Hydrogeology Journal (Springer-Verlag)-Vol. 20, Iss: 5, pp 995-1006
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the nature and scale of the distortions it has created, and alternative approaches which Indian policy makers can use to limit, if not eliminate, the damaging impacts of the distortion.
Abstract: Indian agriculture is trapped in a complex nexus of groundwater depletion and energy subsidies. This nexus is the product of past public policy choices that initially offered opportunities to India’s small-holder-based irrigation economy but has now generated in its wake myriad economic, social, and environmental distortions. Conventional ‘getting-the-price-right’ solutions to reduce these distortions have consistently been undermined by the invidious political economy that the nexus has created. The historical evolution of the nexus is outlined, the nature and scale of the distortions it has created are explored, and alternative approaches which Indian policy makers can use to limit, if not eliminate, the damaging impacts of the distortions, are analysed.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the sustainable development goals (SDGs) as a globally significant test for the implementation of nexus thinking, and propose that the environment has to have a seat at the table for nexus analyses.

487 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the relevance of existing and ongoing scholarship within the water community, as well as current research needs, for understanding FEW processes and systems and implementing FEW solutions through innovations in technologies, infrastructures, and policies is explored.

210 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed an integrated approach to managing and allocating water resources, by involving all actors and stakeholders, and considering how water resources link different sectors of society.
Abstract: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030 represent an ambitious blueprint to reduce inequalities globally and achieve a sustainable future for all mankind. Meeting the SDGs for water requires an integrated approach to managing and allocating water resources, by involving all actors and stakeholders, and considering how water resources link different sectors of society. To date, water management practice is dominated by technocratic, scenario-based approaches that may work well in the short term but can result in unintended consequences in the long term due to limited accounting of dynamic feedbacks between the natural, technical, and social dimensions of human-water systems. The discipline of sociohydrology has an important role to play in informing policy by developing a generalizable understanding of phenomena that arise from interactions between water and human systems. To explain these phenomena, sociohydrology must address several scientific challenges to strengthen the field and broaden its scope. These include engagement with social scientists to accommodate social heterogeneity, power relations, trust, cultural beliefs, and cognitive biases, which strongly influence the way in which people alter, and adapt to, changing hydrological regimes. It also requires development of new methods to formulate and test alternative hypotheses for the explanation of emergent phenomena generated by feedbacks between water and society. Advancing sociohydrology in these ways therefore represents a major contribution toward meeting the targets set by the SDGs, the societal grand challenge of our time.

176 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the interrelations between farms and farming systems in the global food system and highlight trends in major regions of the world and explore possible trajectories for the future and ask: Who are the farmers of the future?
Abstract: Achieving SDG2 (zero hunger) in a situation of rapid global population growth requires a continued focus on food production. Farming not merely needs to sustainably produce nutritious diets, but should also provide livelihoods for farmers, while retaining natural ecosystems and services. Rather than focusing on production principles, this article explores the interrelations between farms and farming systems in the global food system. Evaluating farming systems around the world, we reveal a bewildering diversity. While family farms predominate, these range in size from less than 0.1 ha to more than 10,000 ha, and from hand hoe use to machine-based cultivation, enabling one person to plant more than 500 ha in a day. Yet, farming in different parts of the world is highly interdependent, not least because prices paid for farm produce are largely determined by global markets. Furthermore, the economic viability of farming is a problem, globally. We highlight trends in major regions of the world and explore possible trajectories for the future and ask: Who are the farmers of the future? Changing patterns of land ownership, rental and exchange mean that the concept of ‘what is a farm’ becomes increasingly fluid. Next to declining employment and rural depopulation, we also foresee more environmentally-friendly, less external input dependent, regionalised production systems. This may require the reversal of a global trend towards increasing specialisation to a recoupling of arable and livestock farming, not least for the resilience it provides. It might also require a slow-down or reversal of the widespread trend of scale enlargement in agriculture. Next to this trend of scale enlargement, small farms persist in Asia: consolidation of farms proceeds at a snail’s pace in South-east Asia and 70% of farms in India are ‘ultra-small’ – less than 0.05 ha. Also in Africa, where we find smallholder farms are much smaller than often assumed (< 1 ha), farming households are often food insecure. A raft of pro-poor policies and investments are needed to stimulate small-scale agriculture as part of a broader focus on rural development to address persistent poverty and hunger. Smallholder farms will remain an important source of food and income, and a social safety net in absence of alternative livelihood security. But with limited possibilities for smallholders to ‘step-up’, the agricultural engine of growth appears to be broken. Smallholder agriculture cannot deliver the rate of economic growth currently assumed by many policy initiatives in Africa.

118 citations

References
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Book
01 Jan 1993
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the lessons learned from a wide range of groundwater and irrigation projects throughout the country of India and offer information on their development, projected scope, and ultimate impact on agricultural productivity and economic activity.
Abstract: This volume presents the lessons learned from a wide range of groundwater and irrigation projects throughout the country of India. It offers information on their development, projected scope, and ultimate impact on agricultural productivity and economic activity. This valuable resource will be read with interest by all professionals involved with setting or implementing water policy goals or assessing the likely impact of groundwater projects.

353 citations


"Political economy of the energy-gro..." refers background in this paper

  • ...This was viewed as a ‘public good’ created by private action which needed to be supported and even subsidized (Dhawan 1982; Shah 1993)....

    [...]

  • ...These opened up small-holders’ access to irrigation in ways that government efforts had not succeeded in doing (Wilson 2002; Shah 1993)....

    [...]

  • ...Studies in the 1980s showed that these localized, informal ‘water markets’ were pervasive throughout the length and breadth of South Asia (Shah 1993; Pant 1991; MeinzenDick and Sullins 1994; Wilson 2002; Nagaraj et al. 2005; Palmer Jones 1994)....

    [...]

  • ...1980s showed that these localized, informal ‘water markets’ were pervasive throughout the length and breadth of South Asia (Shah 1993; Pant 1991; MeinzenDick and Sullins 1994; Wilson 2002; Nagaraj et al. 2005; Palmer Jones 1994)....

    [...]

  • ...reason was that tubewell connections were widely dispersed in a vast country side, with most located in remote places that were not easy to reach (Shah 1993; Rao and Govindarajan 2003)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
Tushaar Shah1
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a transition from surface storage to "managed aquifer storage" as the center pin of its water strategy with proactive demand-and supply-side management components.
Abstract: For millennia, India used surface storage and gravity flow to water crops. During the last 40 years, however, India has witnessed a decline in gravity-flow irrigation and the rise of a booming 'water-scavenging' irrigation economy through millions of small, private tubewells. For India, groundwater has become at once critical and threatened. Climate change will act as a force multiplier; it will enhance groundwater's criticality for drought-proofing agriculture and simultaneously multiply the threat to the resource. Groundwater pumping with electricity and diesel also accounts for an estimated 16–25 million mt of carbon emissions, 4–6% of India's total. From a climate change point of view, India's groundwater hotspots are western and peninsular India. These are critical for climate change mitigation as well as adaptation. To achieve both, India needs to make a transition from surface storage to 'managed aquifer storage' as the center pin of its water strategy with proactive demand- and supply-side management components. In doing this, India needs to learn intelligently from the experience of countries like Australia and the United States that have long experience in managed aquifer recharge.

312 citations


"Political economy of the energy-gro..." refers background in this paper

  • ...In the US context, Henry Vaux once said that “groundwater depletion is always self-terminating” because rising pumping costs would make it uneconomic to lift groundwater beyond a certain depth (Shah 2009a)....

    [...]

  • ...The area irrigated by groundwater wells now is far in excess of the area served by public canal systems and the small-scale community tanks that dominated irrigation for millennia (Shah 2009a)....

    [...]

  • ...…management and supply-side measures (such as groundwater recharge and conjunctive management of surface and groundwater) can, over a 7–10 year period, replace a groundwater regime of secular long-term depletion by a regime with relative longterm stability with seasonal fluctuation (Shah 2009b)....

    [...]

  • ...States in western and central United States have created tradable rights in groundwater (Shah 2009a)....

    [...]

Book
15 Dec 2008
TL;DR: Taming the Anarchy as discussed by the authors investigates the forces behind the transformation of South Asian irrigation and considers its social, economic, and ecological impacts, and argues that without effective governance, the resulting groundwater stress threatens the sustenance of the agrarian system and therefore the well being of the nearly one and a half billion people who live in South Asia.
Abstract: In 1947, British India-the part of South Asia that is today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh-emerged from the colonial era with the world's largest centrally managed canal irrigation infrastructure. However, as vividly illustrated by Tushaar Shah, the orderly irrigation economy that saved millions of rural poor from droughts and famines is now a vast atomistic system of widely dispersed tube-wells that are drawing groundwater without permits or hindrances. Taming the Anarchy is about the development of this chaos and the prospects to bring it under control. It is about both the massive benefit that the irrigation economy has created and the ill-fare it threatens through depleted aquifers and pollution. Tushaar Shah brings exceptional insight into a socio-ecological phenomenon that has befuddled scientists and policymakers alike. In systematic fashion, he investigates the forces behind the transformation of South Asian irrigation and considers its social, economic, and ecological impacts. He considers what is unique to South Asia and what is in common with other developing regions. He argues that, without effective governance, the resulting groundwater stress threatens the sustenance of the agrarian system and therefore the well being of the nearly one and a half billion people who live in South Asia. Yet, finding solutions is a formidable challenge. The way forward in the short run, Shah suggests, lies in indirect, adaptive strategies that change the conduct of water users. From antiquity until the 1960‘s, agricultural water management in South Asia was predominantly the affair of village communities and/or the state. Today, the region depends on irrigation from some 25 million individually owned groundwater wells. Tushaar Shah provides a fascinating economic, political, and cultural history of the development and use of technology that is also a history of a society in transition. His book provides powerful ideas and lessons for researchers, historians, and policy

307 citations