Is Irrigation Water Free? A Reality Check in the Indo-Gangetic Basin

Tushaar Shah, Mehmood Ul Hassan, Muhammad Zubair Khattak, Parth Sarthi Banerjee, O.P. Singh and Saeed Rehman

World Development, 2009, vol. 37, issue 2, 422-434

Abstract: Summary "Getting prices right" is the silver bullet widely advocated to developing countries in fighting waste, misallocation and scarcity of water. In the vast, poverty-stricken Indo-Gangetic basin, however, high surrogate water price is driving out small-holder irrigation. With rising diesel prices, most small-holders who use borewells for irrigation find effective water use cost soaring, obliging them to economize on water use even by quitting irrigated farming. Electrified borewell owners, far fewer, face low marginal cost but have to contend with stringent electricity rationing. Public irrigation systems grossly under-price irrigation, but these are getting marginalized despite massive government and donor investments.

Keywords: Indo-Gangetic; basin; water; pricing; water; and; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305-750X(08)00199-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:37:y:2009:i:2:p:422-434

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().