A case for professionalization of water management in irrigation projects in India
| Author | T. K. Jayaraman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230010305 |
| Published date | 01 July 1981 |
| Date | 01 July 1981 |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT,
Vol.
1,
235-244
(1981)
A
case
for
professionalization
of
water management in
irrigation projects in India
T.
K.
JAYARAMAN
Command Area Development
Commissioner,
Gujarat State, India
SUMMARY
The heavy investment in irrigation in India has not brought the expected benefits and this
article argues first that a major difficulty arises from the way irrigated water is
administered. The distribution
of
water is controlled by irrigation engineers who lack the
knowledge and information
to
manage water
in
a way that maximizes agricultural
production and achieves the confidence
of
farmers. The staffing structure and related
professional values discourage the development
of
a new more appropriate specialism.
The article goes on to argue that a new organization
of
work and associated staffing
structure is needed which will encourage a new professional specialization bringing
together staff and expertise currently dispersed in separate specialisms in engineering,
agronomy and other aspects of agriculture.
Substantial investments have been made to increase the irrigation potential
of
the country as part
of
planned development during the last thirty years since
Independence (Government
of
India, 1977, Part
V,
pp.
41-45).
During the
Sixth Five Year Plan the irrigable area
is
expected to increase from the current
53
million hectares to an anticipated 70 million hectares by
1983.
However, it
has been shown that utilization
of
the irrigation potential created thus far has
been dismally low (Murthy,
1976).
Such underutilization has primarily been
attributed to lag in the construction
of
infrastructure at the farm level such as
field channels from the government outlet to individual farmers’ fields for
supplying water and field drains to remove excess water from the fields, and
land levelling and land shaping
so
that water reaches in an even manner to all
parts
of
the field. This particular lag was sought to
be
corrected
by
setting up
Command Area Development Authorities in the mid-seventies which were
to
take up, among other things, on-farm development works below the government
outlets (Jayaraman, 1979).
We have by now six years
of
experience in command area development. In
those projects where on-farm development works have either been completed or
nearly completed, the results assessed in terms of gross area irrigated,
productivity per hectare or desired changes in cropping patterns have still been
found to be far below expectations (Singh, 1979). Reasons are obvious. It is not
Dr. T. K. Jayaraman is Command Area Development Commissioner, Mahi-Kadana Irrigation
Project. Ahmedabad
380
009,
Gujarat State, India. The views expressed in this paper are personal
and do not reflect those
of
the State Government. This is the revised version
of
a paper presented to
a Seminar
on
Water Management Practices in Kerala at the Centre
for
Water Resources
Development and Management, Government
of
Kerala, Kozhikode. October
1980.
0271-2075/81/030235-10$01
.OO
0
1981
by John Wiley
&
Sons,
Ltd.
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