Tushaar Natwarlal Shah

Institute of Rural Management Anand | IRMA

India has done better in achieving har kisan ko pani (water to every farmer) rather than har khet ko pani. Across all states, the proportion of farmers with access to irrigation is higher than the proportion of cropped area under irrigation. Groundwater dominance is associated with high irrigation intensity and agricultural dynamism. In contrast, r...

This report synthesizes learnings from a series of field visits and discussions with operators of solar irrigation pumps and their customers to map out the variety of solar irrigation business models available in Bihar. The report also proffers a qualitative assessment of these models against a clutch of criteria such as: [a] area irrigated per HP;...

This review explores the challenge of groundwater governance in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, China, Bangladesh, and India—which together account for over 2/3rd of the world’s groundwater use in irrigation. Global groundwater economy comprises three sub-economies: [a] diesel-powered unregulated, where use-specific energy subsidies are impractical; [b...

This preprint outlines the opportunity Tamilnadu has to innovatively use grid-connected Solar Irrigation Pumps (SIPs) to resolve 5 problems at one go, viz, curtail unsustainable farm power subsidies, provide farmers uninterrupted day time power for irrigation, offer farmers new source of supplemental income by selling surplus solar power, reduce ca...

Solar-powered irrigation has expanded in India at an unprecedented pace—the number of solar irrigation pumps—from less than 4,000 in 2012 to more than2,50,000 by 2019. It has been argued that besides giving farmers an additional and reliable source of income, grid-connected SIPs also incentivise efficient energy and water use—critical for sustainin...

The epicentre of Gujarat’s perverse nexus between electricity subsidy and groundwater depletion lies in its legacy of 485,000 unmetered tubewell owners who have fiercely resisted metering for 20 years. These comprise 40 percent of Gujarat’s irrigation connections but account for 49 percent of agricultural load, 71 percent of energy use in groundwat...

India’s agricultural economy has undergone profound transformation in the past 50 years with the rapid spread of groundwater irrigation. The tube well revolution has democratized irrigation, made famines history, helped alleviate agrarian poverty and made India food secure. However, the spread of private tube wells has cannibalized canals and tanks...

A 2014 ILO study claimed that India can create millions of rural jobs by raising the value productivity of manure from the present Rs 0.15/kg wet weight to Rs 1.50/kg. Given that Chhattisgarh government has just launched Gaudhan Nyaya, a program to buy gobar at farmers’ door-step at Rs 2/kg, this seems possible and would bring succour to millions o...

Study Region: Semi-Arid Regions of Marathawada, Vidarbha and Saurashtra in India Study Focus: To understand and evaluate the impact of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) efforts. New Hydrological Insights for the Region: Since 1990, the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, India witnessed a massive community-based distributed groundwater recharge movement, in...

This paper explores the impact of irrigation on India’s mixed crop-based dairy production system. It uses a four-equation recursive regression model to outline the impact of water applied under different modes (groundwater irrigation, surface water irrigation, and rainfall) on the bovine herd efficiency and dairy output. The results of the model sh...

Prioritising aviral dhara (uninterrupted flow) over nirmal dhara (unpolluted flow) can deliver quick outcomes in the Namami Gange Programme. Treating human, municipal and industrial waste released into the Ganga is a long-term project requiring vast resources and political energy, besides behavioural change on a mass scale. But, Ganga’s dry season...

Prioritising aviral dhara (uninterrupted flow) over nirmal dhara (unpolluted flow) can deliver quick outcomes in the Namami Gange Programme. Treating human, municipal and industrial waste released into the Ganga is a long-term project requiring vast resources and political energy, besides behavioural change on a mass scale. But, Ganga’s dry season...

A response by the co-authors of the article “Promoting Solar Power as a Remunerative Crop” (EPW, 11 November 2017), to Meera Sahasranaman et al’s discussion article “Solar Irrigation Cooperatives: Creating the Frankenstein’s Monster for India’s Groundwater” (EPW, 26 May 2018), enables a proper assessment of the Dhundi experiment and reiterates the...

For millennia, the Ganges River, holy to Hindus, has provided livelihoods, food, and water for Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Last month, one of India's leading environmental activists died after a 111-day hunger strike, failing to evoke changes to save India's most revered river (known as Ganga). After years of unrelenting abuse, Ganga is now one o...

South Asia's groundwater economy stands at the threshold of a revolution in adoption of solar irrigation pumps (SIPs). This has potential to unlock the region's perverse energy-groundwater nexus. In much of South Asia, the price of energy used in irrigation, the only surrogate for water price, fails to signal the abundance or scarcity of groundwate...

This PPT draws lessons from around the world--but particularly from South Asia--on explosive growth in farmer-led irrigation development in Asia and how to accelerate it in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Union Budget 2018 announced the Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan, a scheme to replace diesel pumps and grid-connected electric tube wells for irrigation with solar irrigation pumps, including a buy-back arrangement for farmers' surplus solar energy at a remunerative price. KUSUM can be a game changer as it can check groundwater over-...

When it was launched in 2005, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was expected to materially alter the working of rural labour markets and create durable assets, both public and private. In 2009–10, and then again in 2010–11, IWMI surveyed the post-MGNREGA rural labour markets and undertook case studies of more than...

Participatory groundwater management is increasingly being recognised for its ability to address the challenges of equity, efficiency and sustainability. It can particularly help with effective engagement at the grassroots level for monitoring, recharging and managing the groundwater as a common pool resource. The main aim of this article is to dis...

Why collective management of irrigation so pervasive in South Asia in the past and is eroding today..

The Union Budget 2018 announced KUSUM, a prodigious Rs 140,000 crore scheme to replace diesel pumps and grid-connected electric tubewells for irrigation by solar irrigation pumps (SIPs) with a buy-back arrangement for farmers' surplus solar energy at a remunerative price. KUSUM can be a game changer. It can check groundwater over-exploitation, offe...

Gujarat state in Western India exemplifies all challenges of an agrarian economy founded on groundwater over-exploitation sustained over decades by perverse energy subsidies. Major consequences are secular decline in groundwater levels, deterioration of groundwater quality, rising energy cost of pumping, soaring carbon footprint of agriculture and...

Anand, the Gujarat town that gave India its dairy cooperative movement, has now spawned in Dhundi village the world’s first solar cooperative that produces Solar Power as a Remunerative Crop. When compared to other models promoting solar irrigation in the country, the SPaRC model, which has successfully completed one year in Dhundi, offers multiple...

Irrigation is central to India's crop-milk mixed farming system. This explains why over three-quarter of public investments in accelerating agrarian growth are devoted to irrigation. Despite massive investments in irrigation development, there are hardly any systematic assessments of irrigation impact on aggregate output. Our eight-equation recursi...

This is the Convocation Address I delivered to the IRMA graduating class in May 2017

If India's water governance is to reform to meet 21st century water challenges, Mihir Shah committee report recommends deep reforms in the working of the country's two strategic water organizations, Central Water Commission (CWC) and Central Groundwater Board (CGWB). Merely merging the two into a National Water Commission will hardly produce the wa...

Groundwater is often over-exploited, and its depletion threatens livelihoods of village communities in India. Existing interventions have been insufficient, and they often fail to engage farmers at the local level. The main aim of MyWell app is to implement mobile phone technology for groundwater monitoring and management in villages in rural India...

With India emerging as the world's largest groundwater irrigator, marginal farmers and tenants in many parts have come to depend on informal water markets for irrigation. Power subsidies have grown these markets and made them pro-poor, but are also responsible for groundwater depletion, and for financial troubles of electricity distribution compani...

IWMI-Tata Program and CCAFS have created a cooperative micro-grid of solar pump owners in Dhundi village which sells surplus power to the national grid after farmers are done with irrigation.

Anand, the small Gujarat town that gave India its dairy cooperative movement, has now spawned a new cooperative that may well grow into a genre of its own. The Dhundi Solar Pump Irrigators' Cooperative Enterprise (SPICE) provides the proof of concept for promoting Solar Power as a Remunerative Crop (SPaRC). We argue that SPaRC presents the best cha...

Solar Pump Irrigators’ Cooperative Enterprise (SPICE) : Early results from the world’s first solar cooperative in Gujarat

In its manifesto for 2014 parliamentary elections, Bharatiya Janta Party gave pride of place to universalizing irrigation access by including "Har Hath Ko Kam, Har Khet Ko Pani" as one of its commitments. After the NDA government came to power, this commitment took the form of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana with an allocation of ₹ 50,000 cror...

India's track record of forming robust, self-sustaining farmer cooperatives has been poor ever since the early 1900s when the movement began. For long, restrictive laws were blamed for their failure. But most of the 2,000 farmer producer companies registered under a new amendment to the Companies Act 1956 appear like old wine in a new bottle. This...

The Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana programme should concentrate on two low-hanging fruits. First, it should quickly put to use 20-40 million ha of unutilised irrigation potential created in major, medium and minor irrigation projects. Second, it should provide better quality power rations to farmers during the time of peak irrigation demand...

The public discourse on the National River Linking Project (NRLP) has been hopelessly lopsided—with the protagonists of the project unable to take on the antagonists on either their rhetoric or their analytics. This paper contributes to the discourse by presenting a balanced analytical point of view from a series of studies conducted by the Interna...

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been advanced as a response to growing problems of water scarcity in the developing world. While the precept of the IWRM process is unexceptionable, its practice has meant a package of interventions. The trouble with the ‘IWRM package’, and indeed the global water governance debate as a whole, is its...

In countries with transitional economies such as those found in South Asia, large-scale irrigation systems (LSIS) with a history of public ownership account for about 115 million ha (Mha) or approximately 45% of their total area under irrigation. In terms of the global area of irrigation (320 Mha) for all countries, LSIS are estimated at 130 Mha or...

Traditionally, Indian farmers kept bovines, especially cattle, for draught purposes in agriculture and transportation with milk as an adjunct. However, with increasing farm mechanization and rising demand for milk, the bovine functions have shifted more towards dairying. While bovine population has been increasing, the chronic scarcity of feed and...

There are many reasons behind the worsening groundwater situation that have led to a scarcity of quality water supply for sustaining lives and livelihoods in India, as well as in other parts of the world. The lack of a proper scientific understanding of this situation by the various stakeholders has been identified as one of the important gaps in t...

Responding to rainfall variability has always been one of the most critical risks facing farmers. It is also an integral part of the job of water managers, whether it be designing interventions for flood management, improving the reliability of water supply for irrigation or advising on priorities during drought conditions. The conventional tools a...

India's White Revolution has made the country the largest milk producer in the world, but this has bypassed the Adivasi heartland of the central Indian plateau. The Vasudhara cooperative, which has organised 1,20,000 mostly Adivasi women from Valsad, Navsari, Dang and Dhule districts into a Rs 1,000-crore dairy business, provides a model for India'...

The runaway growth in states of subsidised solar pumps, which provide quality energy at near-zero marginal cost, can pose a bigger threat of groundwater over-exploitation than free power has done so far. The best way to meet this threat is by paying farmers to "grow" solar power as a remunerative cash crop. Doing so can reduce pressure on aquifers,...

Sustainable use of groundwater is becoming critical in India and requireseffective participation from local communities along with technical, social, economic,policy and political inputs. Access to groundwater for farming communities is also anemotional and complex issue as their livelihood and survival depends on it. In this article,we report on t...

Gujarat state in Western India exemplifies all challenges of an agrarian economy founded on groundwater overexploitation sustained over decades by perverse energy subsidies. Major consequences are: secular decline in groundwater levels, deterioration of groundwater quality, rising energy cost of pumping, soaring carbon footprint of agriculture and...

Integrated water resources management provides a set of ideas to help us manage water more holistically. However, these ideas have been formalized over time in what has now become, in capitals, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), with specific prescriptive principles whose implementation is often supported by donor funding and internation...

Agrarian stagnation was much the same in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat and the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra until 1990, and for similar reasons. Since then, Saurashtra's agriculture has been growing, especially after 2000, at an accelerated pace, while Vidarbha's farmers have continued to stagnate. This paper interrogates why, and suggests som...

India’s 2.25 million ha of village tanks were for centuries loosely managed as multiple-use common property resources, including for fishing by artisanal fisher-folk, the lowest in the social hierarchy. During the 1970s and after, the aquaculture productivity revolution created a vibrant new political economy by increasing manyfold the value of fis...

Price of solar panels has declined rapidly. Encouraged by increasing affordability of the technology and its promise to curb the demand for subsidised electricity, state governments in India are aggressively promoting solar irrigation pumps. Rajasthan became the pioneer by announcing a scheme in 2011 with 86% subsidy to horticulture farmers who use...

Since 2005, Government of Gujarat has been organising an annual, month-long, pre-monsoon Krishi Mahotsava (Agrarian Festival) campaign to expose farmers to new farming technologies and market opportunities, enhance their interaction with scientists and input suppliers, and improve their access to various government schemes. Krishi Mahotsava entails...

Smallholder irrigation is emerging as a development priority in Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on a survey of 1554 smallholders from nine countries, this paper compares rainfed farming with gravity-flow, manual-lift and motor-pump irrigation. Motor-pump-irrigation farmers reported the highest net value added per acre and per family worker, with gravity-...

South Asia has emerged during recent decades as a major theater of tension and conflict around shared rivers. The region is made up of predominantly rural, poor, and agrarian societies. While in recent years India has been showcased as an emerging economic power, the benefits of Indian economic growth have mainly been concentrated in the southern a...