Breaking the Agrarian Impasse in Eastern India: Understanding the Land-Water-Energy-Food Nexus

The fact that irrigation has acted as a key driver of agricultural growth and poverty reduction in many regions in India has motivated many researchers to aggressively lobby for subsidized power connections for wells and free or subsidized electricity in the farm sector as a ‘silver bullet’ for breaking the agricultural stagnation and reducing rural poverty in eastern India, under the pretext that it would help poor small and marginal farmers in this water abundant region to access well irrigation at affordable costs.

The recent policy decision of the government of West Bengal to offer heavily subsidized power connections for well irrigation, and to remove the restrictions on issuing permits for drilling new energized wells is probably the outcome of one such lobbying. But, this decision has not taken cognizance of the situation vis-a-vis arable land and agro-ecology and other socio-economic realities of the State. While these policies would do no good to WB's agriculture, it would surely and certainly do long term harm to the State's water and energy economy. Some of the recent writings eulogizing the above policy are built on faulty assumptions. The new policy instead is retrograde in nature, as compared to the landmark decision of the Left Front government in the state to introduce metering of agricultural power users and charge for electricity on the basis of actual consumption and cost of supply. It would only lead to a windfall gain for the existing diesel pump owners, as they would be able to produce water cheap and sell it to poor farmers at prohibitive prices.

We argue that a policy which is based on a strategy for intensifying the use of land and water will not work in eastern India. Instead, a new policy for agricultural growth, which is driven by the strategy of enhancing the productivity of land and water and which is built on the concept of multiple use systems, is needed.