Enhancing resilience or exacerbating inequity? Revisiting irrigation investments in India

There is an increasing emphasis in India on building climate resilience through public investments in irrigation. Maharashtra’s Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture is a first such state implementation. Although resilience is a systems concept, the project targets individual farm-level investments. Our aim is to evaluate how these investments reshape water access amongst all farmers and how they impact resilience. In our study area in Jalna district, we evaluate the proposed interventions by combining field data with a modelling approach. Two indices are developed to indicate resilience: Irrigation Risk Index and Lock-in Index. We find that though the project increases the volume of water harvested, farmers are incentivized to use most of it through agricultural intensification with no buffer to deal with shocks. Despite an apparent focus on the resilience, the implementation prioritises increasing productivity of the irrigators over addressing vulnerability of rainfed agriculture. Moreover, the promotion of multiyear orchards creates a lock-in and reduces the adaptive capacity of irrigators. At the same time, due to the common-pool-resource property of water, less is available for the supplemental irrigation needs of other farmers. We conclude that the programme not only reduces resilience but also exacerbates inequity in water access. The research contributes to debates on investments for productive versus supplemental irrigation in rainfed areas. It also highlights the need for incorporating an equity lens when designing for resilience.