Water Resource Economics : Towards a Sustainable Use of Water for Irrigation in India

This book uses resource economics costing approaches incorporating externalities to estimate the returns for the country's irrigation, and demonstrates how underestimating the cost of water leads farmers to overestimate profits. The importance of the subject can be judged in light of the fact that India is the largest user of groundwater both for irrigation and for drinking purposes, pumping twice as much as the United States and six times as much as Europe. Despite water's vital role in ensuring economic security for the nation and farmers alike by supporting more than 70% of food production, water resource economists are yet to impress upon farmers and policymakers the true value of water and the urgent need for its sustainable extraction, recharge and use. In an endeavor to promote more awareness, the book further delineates the roles of the demand side and supply side in the economics of irrigation, and explains how the cost of water varies with the efforts to recharge it, crop patterns, degrees of initial and premature well failure, and degrees of externalities. It also discusses the importance of micro-irrigation in the economics of saving water for irrigation, estimating the marginal productivity of water and how it improves with drip irrigation, the economics of water sharing and water markets, optimal control theory in sustainable extraction of water, payment of ecosystem services for water, and how India can effectively recover. In closing, the book highlights the role of socioeconomic and hydrogeological factors in the economics of irrigation, which vary considerably across hard rock areas, and the resulting limitations on generalizing Front Matter....Pages i-xli Water for Irrigation: An Overview....Pages 1-24 Externality in Irrigation....Pages 25-36 Unidirectional and Reciprocal Externality in Irrigation....Pages 37-42 Sand Mining Externality....Pages 43-82 Relationship Between Rainfall and Recharge....Pages 83-86 Marginal Productivity of Water....Pages 87-94 Costing Water for Irrigation....Pages 95-107 Locating Interference and Valuing Water....Pages 109-123 Demand Side Economics of Micro-irrigation....Pages 125-138 Supply-Side Economic Contribution of Watershed Programme to Groundwater Recharge....Pages 139-148 Water Markets for Sharing Limited Water....Pages 149-172 Sustainable Path of Extraction of Groundwater in Tank and Canal Command Areas....Pages 173-189 Water Policy....Pages 191-195 Estimated Cost of Surface Water and Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) for Water....Pages 197-200 Economics of Artificial Recharge of Borewell in Hard-Rock Areas....Pages 201-204 Economics of Sharing Irrigation Water....Pages 205-208 Back Matter....Pages 209-212