Wasted potential

Creating facilities for irrigation is the easiest, as also the surest, way of boosting agricultural production. Yet, this aspect is getting neither its due priority nor adequate funding, so that it can help improve farm production. This is borne out by the pattern of public investment in irrigation, which has steadily declined from 23 per cent of the total outlay in the first five-year Plan (1951-56) to a mere 5 per cent in the 10th Plan (2002-07). It is no wonder then that the number of unfinished irrigation projects has been swelling, even as costs escalate. A sizeable chunk of more than 470 medium and minor irrigation projects that had spilled over to the 10th Plan have in fact been carried forward to the 11th Plan and (which started in April), and could well spill over into subsequent Plans as well. That is because the funds needed for completing these old projects and the new projects mooted during the 10th Plan are reckoned at over Rs 2,00,000 crore. That money can be found as it amounts to no more than 1% of GDP each year for five years; the real challenges lie elsewhere.

What is disquieting therefore is the general apathy towards this sector, especially by the state governments, whose baby this actually is, in letting a substantial portion of the exploitable irrigation potential remain untapped, allowing precious water to flow down into the sea. Worse still, not only is the pace of creating fresh irrigation potential too slow (0.5-0.9 million hectares a year), the gainful utilisation of the created potential is tardy, too. Of a little less than 100 million hectares that have technically been brought under irrigation, no more than 84 million hectares are actually receiving water, which is the key input for crops. If the pace of creating fresh irrigation remains so sluggish, it may take nearly half a century, if not more, to exploit the entire available irrigation potential of 140 million hectares""which can be stretched to 175 million hectares through inter-basin water transfers.

Though the reasons for such a dismal state of affairs on the irrigation front are several, the failure to provide finance remains the most critical at a time when government finances have the cushion for the required degree of spending. Unfortunately, even Central intervention through financial assistance under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP) has had only a limited impact. Unable or unwilling to muster their share of resources, the states often divert these funds to other areas. The same politicians who make an issue of farmer suicides do little to provide money for increasing the country's irrigation capacity.

As it happens, irrigation is the one field that is capable of generating enough resources for its sustenance and expansion. Till Independence in 1947, the irrigation sector was a net revenue earner for the government. It became a drag on the Budget chiefly because, on shortsighted populist considerations, the water rates were kept too low to recover even the operational and maintenance costs of irrigation projects. Besides rendering the irrigation sector financially sick, this has proved counter-productive by causing waterlogging and soil salinity as it has encouraged indiscriminate use of water in the irrigation command areas. Thus, measures like the creation of water users' bodies to operate and maintain water works; adoption of the warabandi approach in water distribution; and imposition of economically rational water tariffs can help restore the fiscal health of this sector, making it self-sustaining once again.