ABSTRACT
Ground water has rapidly emerged to occupy a dominant place in India’s agriculture and is therefore critical to food security. It has become the main source of growth in irrigation over the past three decades, and now accounts for over 60 per cent of the irrigated area in the country. The development of groundwater irrigation has had only limited government involvement, having arisen gradually through highly decentralized private activity. In many cases these activities have escaped the gaze of policy makers, or have been considered too difficult to monitor in the politico-economic sense at least. Accordingly, it is important to acknowledge at the outset that the institutional ingredients of ground-water activities are likely to differ markedly from those outlined for surface water in the previous chapter, where the state played a major role in water resource development.
