Browsing by Author "Shah, Tushaar"

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Building High-Performance Knowledge Institutions
(2003) Shah, Tushaar
"Recent research has identified traits that set high performance knowledge institutions apart from those that fail to deliver. By applying these concepts to failing organizations we can create world class institutions for research, policy formation and development."
A Case for Pipelining Water Distribution in the Narmada Irrigation System in Gujarat, India
(2010) Shah, Tushaar; Krishnan, Sunderrajan; Hemant, Pullabhotla; Verma, Shilp; Chandra, Ashish; Sudhir, Chillerege
"Thanks to farmers’ resistance to provide land for constructing watercourses below the outlets, India’s famous Sardar Sarovar Project is stuck in an impasse. Against a potential to serve 1.8 million hectares, the Project was irrigating just 100,000 hectares five years after the dam and main canals were ready. Indications are that full project benefits will get delayed by years, even decades. In this paper, IWMI researchers advance ten reasons why the Project should abandon its original plan of constructing open channels and license private service providers to invest in pumps and buried pipeline networks to sell irrigation service to farmers."
Changing Consumption Patterns: Implications on Food and Water Demand in India
(2007) Amarasinghe, Upali A.; Shah, Tushaar; Singh, Om Prakash
"Increasing income and urbanization are triggering a rapid change in food consumption patterns in India. This report assesses India's changing food consumption patterns and their implications on future food and water demand. According to the projections made in this study, the total calorie supply would continue to increase, but the dominance of food grains in the consumption basket is likely to decrease by 2050, and the consumption of non-grain crops and animal products would increase to provide a major part of the daily calorie supply. Although the total food grain demand will decrease, the total grain demand is likely to increase with the increasing feed demand for the livestock. The implications of the changing consumption patterns are assessed through consumptive water use (CWU) under the assumptions of full or partial food self-sufficiency."
Elixir or Opiate?: An Assessment of Minor Irrigation Policies in North Bengal
(2000) Shah, Tushaar
"Provides a socioeconomic analysis of Minor Irrigation (MI) investments in North Bengal. The study addresses the following questions: whether there is justification and rationale for MI subsidies in North Bengal; whether the North Bengal Terai Development Project's current subsidy policy achieves the Project's MI objectives in an efficient, sustainable and livelihood intensive manner, and if there is scope for modifying the current policies for better impact."
Energy-Irrigation Nexus in South Asia: Improving Groundwater Conservation and Power Sector Viability
(2003) Shah, Tushaar; Scott, Christopher; Kishore, Avinash; Sharma, Abhishek
"The report suggests that the inability to manage groundwater and energy economies as a nexus is a great opportunity missed in moving towards sustainable groundwater management. In South Asia, there seems to be no practical means for the direct management of groundwater. Laws are unlikely to check the chaotic race to extract groundwater because of the logistical problems of regulating a large number of small, dispersed users. Water pricing and property-right reforms also will not work for the same reasons. Appropriate policies for the supply and pricing of power offer a powerful toolkit for the indirect management of both groundwater and energy use."
Farmer Organizations for Lift Irrigation: Irrigation Companies and Tubewell Cooperatives of Gujarat
(1993) Shah, Tushaar; Bhattacharya, Saumindra
"Group ownership and management of lift irrigation becomes important where small and fragmented land holdings make individual ownership of wells unviable, and where tubewell installation entails high capital costs and is fraught with high risks of failure. In central and north Gujarat where both these situations co-exist, a range of institutional innovations have facilitated the rise of a plurality of contracts and regimes for collective ownership and management of irrigation assets. Prominent amongst these are: water markets, tubewell co-operatives and irrigation companies. This study reports results of interviews with 27 co-operatives and 13 companies focusing essentially on their internal organisation, management and control. While member-owned irrigation companies appear uniformly more robust and productive compared to co-operatives, their equity impacts too are not necessarily inferior to co-operatives."
The Groundswell of Pumps: Multilevel Impacts of a Silent Revolution
(2003) Molle, François; Shah, Tushaar; Barker, Randolph
"In the wake of the 'green revolution' another more silent and crucial transformation is occurring. The dissemenation of relatively cheap pumping technology has revolutionized access to both underground water (deep wells or shallow wells) and surface water (tapping rivers and drains and flows in irrigation canals). Pumps and tube wells have played a prominent role in irrigation in the semiarid regions for many decades. However, with the steady decline in costs, pumps are now, to a large degree, privately owned and have spread rapidly, especially in the monssonal regions of Asia. This has superimposed a logic of individual, flexible, and on-demand access to water, which has far-reaching and, as yet overlooked, implications for the regulation and management of our water resources. The first part of the paper describes the upsurge in the use of pumps and the wide variety of physical conditions and institutional arrangements under which pumps are owned and operated. The second part of the paper, through a series of examples in selected countries, examines the consequences of the spread of cheap pumping technology - water rights and the reordering of access to water, private ownership and collective action, and the implications for integrated managements of privately owned pumps which publicly operated surface irrigation systems. These examples serve as a basis for the conclusion, which spells out the hydrological social, management and economic impacts of the pump revolution."
The Groundwater Economy of Pakistan
(2003) Qureshi, Asad Sarwar; Shah, Tushaar; Akhtar, Mujeeb
"This working paper presents the results of a comprehensive groundwater survey of Pakistan, designed to understand the dynamics of groundwater use, operation and maintenance patterns, socio-economics of groundwater irrigation, land use pattern, crops, yields, and groundwater irrigation practices."
India's Water Future to 2025-2050: Business-as-Usual Scenario and Deviations
(2007) Amarasinghe, Upali A.; Shah, Tushaar; Turral, Hugh; Anand, B. K.
"With a rapidly expanding economy many changes are taking place in India today. The business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, which assumes the continuation of current trends of key water demand drivers, will meet the future food demand. However, it leads to a severe regional water crisis by 2050, where many river basins will reach closure, will be physically water-scarce and will have regions with severely overexploited groundwater resources. While the alternative scenarios of water demand show both optimistic and pessimistic water futures, the scenario with additional productivity growth is the most optimistic, with significant scope for reducing future water demand."
Institutional Alternatives in African Smallholder Irrigation: Lessons from International Experience with Irrigation Management Transfer
(2002) Shah, Tushaar; Van Koppen, Barbara; Merrey, Douglas J.; de Lange, Marna; Samad, Madar
"This report reviews several decades of global experience in transferring management of government-run irrigation systems to farmer associations or other nongovernment agencies in an attempt to apply the lessons of success to the African smallholder irrigation context. Based on a comparative study of the experience of several countries, analysts have suggested that Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) works provided certain preconditions are met, viz., supportive legal-policy framework; secure water rights; local management capacity building; and an enabling process to facilitate management transfer. This paper reasons, however, that straightforward IMT-even with all these conditions fulfilled-is unlikely to work in the African smallholder context. It suggests that institutional alternatives most likely to work in this context are those that successfully deal with the entire complex of constraints facing African smallholders and help them move to a substantially higher trajectory of productivity and income from where they can absorb the additional cost and responsibility of managing their irrigation systems. In developing such institutional alternatives, rather than focusing only on direct transfer of irrigation management, African governments need to begin by enhancing the wealth-creating potential of smallholder irrigated farming by strengthening market access, promoting high-value crops, and improving systems for providing extension and technical support to smallholder irrigators."
Irrigation Management in Pakistan and India:Comparing Notes on Institutions and Policies
(2000) Shah, Tushaar; Hussain, Intizar; ur Rehman, Saeed
"These notes present the impressions gathered by a team of Indian and Pakistani economists on contemporary issues in irrigation management in these two countries. The authors suggest that the two countries can learn important lessons by comparing notes on several issues: [a] what would work best in ensuring equitable access to irrigation—physical rehabilitation being tried out in Pakistan Punjab with the help of the army under the military rule offers interesting possibilities in terms of scale and impact as does the Andhra Pradesh model of irrigation reform, [b] the experience in both countries so far defies the uncritically accepted premise that under farmer-management, irrigation systems will be more equitable, [c] why farmers in Pakistan Punjab have to use 16-20 horsepower (hp) diesel engines to pump groundwater from 25-40 feet while north Indian farmers have been doing the same with 5 hp engines—if it is because of compulsion of habit, appropriate policies can save Pakistan substantial diesel fuel per year, [d] India needs to ask why diesel engines in Lahore cost only 40-50 percent of the retail price they command in Lucknow or Ludhiana—we suggest allowing free imports of Chinese pumps will do away with the need for pump subsidies that keep diesel engines over-priced in India, [e] both Pakistan and India need to pay serious attention to promoting simple pump modifications that can increase fuel efficiency of their pumps by 40-70 percent, [f] India and Pakistan need to compare notes on their rich experience of electricity pricing policies to achieve viability of electricity supply to farmers and to achieve important goals of groundwater management and policy."
Pedaling out of Poverty: Social Impact of a Manual Irrigation Technology in South Asia
(2000) Shah, Tushaar; Alam, M.; Dinesh Kumar, M.; Nagar, Rashmi K.; Singh, Mahendra
"This paper offers an assessment of the social impact of treadle pump technology for manual irrigation in eastern India, the Nepal Terai, and Bangladesh, South Asias so-called poverty square. This region where 500 million of the world's poorest people live is underlain by one of the worlds best groundwater resources. Treadle pump technology can be a powerful tool for poverty reduction in this region. It self-selects the poor and it puts to productive use the regions vast surplus family labor. It is claimed that the treadle pump could raise the annual net household income by US$100, on the average. "This report reviews evidence from a variety of studies including our own designed to test these claims, and concludes that: a) Treadle pump technology does self-select the poor, although the first-generation adopters tend to be the less poor. b) It does raise net annual incomes of adopter households by US$50-500, with the modal value in the neighborhood of US$100. It transforms smallholder farming systems in different ways in different sub-regions; in north Bengal and Bangladesh, treadle pump adopters take to cultivation of high-yielding rice in the boro season while elsewhere adopters turn to vegetable cultivation and marketing. c) Treadle pump use results in increased landuse intensity as well as priority cultivation. Adopters use crop-saving irrigation in a large part of their holding but practice highly intensive farming in the priority plot. d) Average crop yields on priority plots tend to be much higher than yields obtained by farmers using diesel pumps or other irrigation devices. e) The income impact of treadle pump technology varies across households and regions, but US$100 per year is a conservative estimate of the average increase in annual net income. Less enterprising adopters achieve fuller employment at an implicit wage rate that is 1.5-2.5 times the market rate. The more enterprising take to intelligent commercial farming and earn substantially more. "For a marginal farmer in this region with US$12-15 to spare, there could hardly be a better investment than a treadle pump, which has a benefit-cost ratio of 5, an internal rate of return of 100 percent, and a payback period of one year. It thus ideally fills the need of the marginal farmers in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. The challenge lies in its marketing; exceptional ingenuity seems to be required to put the treadle pump in the hands of millions of rural poor. In Bangladesh, where this has become possible, over a million pumps sold so far probably do not account for a large proportion of the irrigated area but have certainly reached a significant proportion of Bangladesh's rural poor. In eastern India and the Nepal Terai, the technology was introduced only in the 1990s and, therefore, total sales have been in the neighborhood of 200,000 against an estimated ultimate potential of 9-10 million. For a significant impact on poverty in the region, treadle pump sales need to quickly cross the 100,000 per year mark in eastern India and the Nepal Terai, possibly by recreating the conditions that led to Bangladeshs 3-year long sales boom during the early 1990s, which very nearly saturated its treadle pump market. If International Development Enterprises (IDE), the NGO that promotes the treadle pump, wants to achieve this feat, it must improve on three aspects of its business strategy: - First, it needs to do serious rethinking on its current strategy of offering only a single highquality, high-price product and consider placing on offer several price-quality combinations; this seems critical, especially in view of the Bangladesh experience, which suggests that the treadle pump demand, especially in regard to first-time buyers, is highly responsive to price and hardly responsive to quality. - Second, IDE needs to review the pros and cons of the tight, IDE-controlled marketing organization it has created in India and explore whether its mission might not be better achieved through a let a hundred flowers bloom approach of stimulating competition in treadle pump manufacture and marketing. - Finally, IDE needs to devise strategic responses to the threat posed to the treadle pump program by subsidy schemes for mechanical pumps and opportunities offered by persistent increases in the prices of fossil fuels and electricity."
Rethinking Rehabilitation: Socio-Ecology of Tanks and Water Harvesting in Rajasthan, North-West India
(2001) Shah, Tushaar; Raju, K. Vengamma
"In the arid and semi-arid Indian state of Rajasthan, tanks and ponds have been a mainstay of rural communities for centuries. There are over 4600 large minor irrigation tanks, plus numerous johads, bandhs and pals (small water harvesting structures). This paper assesses a strategy proposed for rehabilitating 1200 of the larger tanks. It argues that treating tanks only as flow irrigation systems--which lies at the center of the mainstream thinking on rehabilitating surface irrigation systems--is very likely to result in a flawed strategy when applied to tanks. Instead, reviewing the successful experience of NGOs like PRADAN and Tarun Bharat Sangh in reviving and rehabilitating clusters of small traditional water harvesting structures at a watershed level, it posits that Rajasthan's tanks belong more to the watershed development domain than to the irrigation domain and that a strategy that views tanks as multi-use socio-ecological constructs, and which recognizes varied stakeholder groups is more likely to enhance the social value of tanks."
Sustainable Development of Groundwater Resources: Lessons from Amrapur and Husseinabad Villages, India
(1990) Shah, Tushaar
"In a workshop on groundwater management at the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA) held in March 1989, Rolf Mueller, one of the workshop participants, called groundwater a 'free, but scarce' resource: Because it is free, it is used freely where there are no rules which define who can take how much of this precious resource, and because it is scarce it tends to get exhausted with rising pressures of demand. As a result, in many areas, conditions of over-exploitation of groundwater aquifers have resulted in serious ecological consequences. "In such areas, groundwater management regimes can go in either of two ways. Firstly, the groundwater balance may be disrupted and (the farming system) may fall to a new equilibrium at lower levels of output and incomes. Alternatively, some system of rules may be accepted by groundwater users that so regulates each user's behaviour as to begin a new, sustainable, community-based management of the resource."
Wells and Welfare in the Ganga Basin: Public Policy and Private Initiative in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India
(2001) Shah, Tushaar
"Eastern India is home to 88 million, or nearly a third of Indias rural poor. Although its industrial economy has stagnated, the region offers vast scope for accelerated development of irrigated agriculture based especially on groundwater wells. While much of South Asia suffers from acute overexploitation of groundwater resources, eastern India has over one-fourth of Indias usable groundwater resources; and less than one fifth of it is developed. Stimulating groundwater development in the region is not only central to creating livelihoods and welfare for its poor but also to addressing its syndrome of extensive waterlogging and flood-proneness. This report analyzes how public policies designed to promote groundwater development over the past 50 years have failed in their promise, and how initiative by private agents can generate the social welfare the region needs so direly. The report outlines a five-pronged strategy for attacking eastern Indias rural poverty through fuller utilization of its groundwater resources. First, eastern India needs to scrap its existing minor irrigation programs run by government bureaucracies, which gobble up funds but deliver little irrigation. Second, while the electricity-supply environment is in total disarray, innovative ideas such as decentralized retailing and metering of power and prepaid electricity cards need to be piloted as part of a broader initiative to improve the quality of power supply to agriculture. Third, programs are needed to improve the unacceptably low energy-efficiency of electric as well as diesel pumps. Fourth, there is a need to promote diesel pumps under 5-hp and improved manual irrigation technologies such as treadle pumps. Finally, above all else, east Indian States need to reform their pump subsidy schemes a la Uttar Pradesh (UP) so as to ameliorate the scarcity of pump capital that lies at the heart of the problem."