Economic access to groundwater irrigation under alternate energy regimes in Bihar

With abundant groundwater resources, Bihar has the potential to harness the positive groundwater and agricultural development linkages by improving the economic access to groundwater irrigation. Using the representative data from Central Groundwater Board and the 5^th Minor Irrigation Census, this study has examined the spatio-temporal changes in groundwater level, and compared the groundwater extraction cost under different energy policy regimes. The analysis shows a stable groundwater level in large parts of the state. The majority of the groundwater pumps are dependent on diesel energy, which is more than four times costlier than electric energy. Electric pumps are economical than diesel pumps even without the power subsidy. As the power supply in the state has been improving, farmers can significantly reduce irrigation costs by shifting to electric pumps. Among the electric pump owners, farmers with metered pricing (pro-rata) incur less energy cost as compared to flat-rate pricing. Bihar presently has both flat and pro-rata based pricing policies for electric pumps, leading to a trade-off between economic and equity aspects of groundwater use which needs to be optimized.