ASSESSING IMPACT OF IRRIGATION PROJECTS

Irrigation has been the key ingredient in achieving the goals of green revolution in late 1970s and 1980s across the world. Many areas suffering chronic food and water shortages were brought out of misery and made sustainable. As per FAO, irrigation is underlying 40 precent of the agriculture production in the world. Apart from bringing reliability in agricultural production there are a number of downstream effects on the society that help the economy of the beneficiary area become more resilient and flourishing. Of late, there has been considerable soul searching and opinion making where the impacts generated by the irrigation projects are viewed in adverse light. Especially, the environmental ideologues have a tendency to highlight the adverse outcomes by discounting the benefits that have occurred over a long time. Assessing the performance of an irrigation project is a well defined process. The performance assessment involves largely quantity based parameters and distribution of water to the individual beneficiaries versus their demands. However, assessment of the impact of an irrigation project is a complex exercise looking beyond the production and financial outcomes. While a good amount of work on performance is already in place, the corresponding knowledge and procedures for the impact assessment are not available widely. The purpose of performance assessment is to achieve efficient and effective use of resources by providing relevant feedback to the management at all levels. Moreover, it helps with obtaining useful information in order that corrective actions may be taken to maximize the benefits of the irrigation project. The performance evaluation also could help with verifying the relevant project lessons learned and developing benchmarks to improve planning, implementation, and management of similar projects. It worth mention that, the performance evaluation assists in improving the performance of irrigation systems and there are many case studies show how evaluation process helped in enhancing and developing the performance of irrigation projects. The performance assessment largely involves assessment and reliability of the source of water for irrigation, efficiencies achieved in distribution and constraints faced, equitability of distribution amongst various beneficiary areas located at different points in distribution systems and also the availability of the water in a timely manner for the farmers. The performance assessment may also look at improvement in yields and incomes. Techniques like benchmarking are used for performance assessment for the irrigation projects. As seen above, the performance assessment exercises are largely quantitative. They involve measurements of the physical and financial outcomes. However, it is seen that an irrigation project provides a multitude of other outcomes which are not directly participating in the performance assessment process but do form the benefits to the command area communities. The impact assessment largely provides for such tangible and intangible benefits that occur to the communities who are beneficiary of the water resources harnessed for the project. Many a times, the irrigation projects do not cater only to the agricultural sector but also provide for the drinking and industrial water requirements for urban, peri-urban and rural areas falling within their area of operation. The overall economic level improvement at primary level of consumption is catered at the performance level but the downstream effects of such improvements are not adequately captured by the performance exercises taken up in conventional sense. It is observed that over a longer period of time such benefits overtake the original benefits envisaged. In this context, the impact assessment of an irrigation project becomes necessary for truly understanding the overall benefits that the project investments have brought to the society in general. Irrigation projects come in all shapes and sizes. There are schemes which cover areas of a few tens of hectares and there are large projects covering thousands and even multiple million of hectares of land. The size of the benefits and its tangible and intangible impacts vary greatly due to their sizes. Thus, a one size fits all approach for the impact assessment is difficult to establish. Still, there are some common features which have to be incorporated in the impact assessment exercise. The assessment of the pre-project conditions prevailing in the beneficiary area are required for forming a base line over which the progress can be measured. The pre-project conditions assessment should incorporate the occurrence of food and energy shortages, overall levels of economic activities, presence of other facilities like transportation, post-harvest market sizes and returns available, variability of returns in different years, land prices and tax collections, education levels prevailing in the area, economic migration from the area due to non-viability of agriculture etc. The benefits occurring out of post-implementation scenario can be divided into two categories namely, tangible and non-tangible. The tangible benefits are easy to quantify like the quantum of water distributed, increases in production in service areas etc. The intangible benefits (can also be called indirect of incidental benefits) are the ones which are difficult to quantify but they are equally important for the society. Such intangible benefits can be increase in land prices and monetization of land assets by the beneficiaries and their progress by switching to other associated professions. Increase in savings which result in better capital availability in the market for investments and growths, development of post-harvest processing industries and consequent improvements in dietary preference and even nutritional securities are quite difficult to quantify. However, at the ground level, such benefits serve a much larger group than the direct beneficiary farmers. The increased production and engagement in productive labor can also improve the law-and-order environment bringing stability to the society. Unfortunately, the norms for quantifying such non-tangible benefits are yet to be formed. Formation of such norms may be dependent upon the socio-economical conditions of the country. The time lines to be followed for the impact assessment exercises are also quite important. As the experience in the developing countries go, the time lines by which the benefits are felt by the society are relatively longer. The beneficiaries take time to adopt to new regime and integrate in their operations. Also, the rate of private capital generation take time. On the other hand, the performance assessments are carried out as a post-implementation exercise almost a few years after the implementation of the key structures like source and construction of distribution network at higher levels of main and branch/distributary canals/pipelines. Hence, the performance assessment or completion surveys are often not able to capture the long term benefits of the project. This is not to under rate the importance of performance assessments. The performance assessments are able to bring out the deficiencies in the designs and planning, construction defects and unsatisfied requirements for the project. Implementation of MASSCOTE type approaches help in quantifying such needs. With increasing competition for development funding, Irrigation projects have been left behind compared to the other development initiatives. To support the priority of other sectors, the irrigation projects are largely attributed with lack of desired outputs, non-realization of envisaged financial outputs and various ill effects on environment etc. The long term role played by the irrigation projects is often not quantified and is relegated to background due to lack of such impact assessment studies. The situation has also been aggravated due to long gestation periods resulting from various ancillary factors. However, if an impact assessment is carried out well after the full implementation of the project, it provides the clear picture of the development goals achieved. Carrying out such impact assessment is in the interest of the project owners as it will provide them the rationale for achieving the multi-dimensional benefits to the society and consequently prioritize the projects in the funding pipeline. Irrigation communities need to seriously take up the projection of clearer pictures. An interesting observation made by the author while dealing with the public representatives like parliamentarians is relevant to quote here. it was seen that the parliamentarians who were rooted at the ground level were almost uniformly pitching for irrigation projects in their respective areas whereas the parliamentarians having advanced economic and public administration backgrounds were some times arguing against such investments in preference to other measures. The reason being the appreciation of the impact in an intuitional manner by the representatives rooted to the local milieu. Hence, the irrigation development will be greatly helped by having such long term impact assessments. Irrigation managers and proponents need to think on these issues raised.