The Role of Water User' Association for Efficient and Equitable Use of Water Resources : The Case of Tank Irrigation in South India.

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1. Among the Indian states, Tamil Nadu state is known for its groundwater over-exploitation. Coimbatore district due to its hard-rock nature extracts the groundwater from deep aquifers. The average well failure in the district is about 49 percent. Irrigation intensity has reduced from 115.5 percent in 1992 to 103.7 percent in 2002. Cost of uncertainty was Rs 15736 per hectare compared to the average income of Rs 19075 per hectare which made the farmers to invest in wells. Under these circumstances, investment in watershed activities, adoption of well spacing norms, water saving technologies and farmer education will help sustain the well irrigation in hard rock regions.2. Vulnerability is often reflected in the condition of the economic system as well as the socioeconomic characteristics of the population living in that system. This paper attempts to construct a picture of socioeconomic context of vulnerability by focusing on indicators that measure both the state of development of the region as well as its capacity to progress further. The structure and methodologies used to calculate the vulnerability index follows the approach developed by Anand and Sen (1994) for the calculation of the human development index (HDI). We come to know that high rainfall zone that includes only Kanyakumari district is the most vulnerable ones among the total of seven agro climatic zones in Tamilnadu throughout the three different time periods.3. We compare alternative institutions with market power in each micro-market with benchmark cases-social planning and a competitive regime with distribution failure. Empirical results show that the regime with market failure in distribution may be preferred to a distribution monopoly, while both may be dominated by monopoly power in the input or output markets. If the policy goal is to maximize the size of the grid, the distribution monopoly does best.