ABSTRACT

appeals to many economists is to institutionalise a market, as with some canals of Spain, Italy, and the United States [Maass and Anderson, 1978; Wade, 1979]. But the enforcement problem would be extremely difficult to overcome: Indian canals are typically many times bigger than where water markets are used (500 to 1,000 outlets in a typical canal system) and each outlet irrigates a much bigger area (perhaps 200 acres or more), belonging to many more farmers, who are much more unequal in wealth and power. At present canal managers are not able to deliver a constant discharge to each outlet down each distributory, let alone one which varies from outlet to outlet depending on demand. (With bribe or extortion payments, as we have seen, only a limited number of outlets or distributory offtakes need be controlled; the rest can get the residual.) Secondly, where paddy is a major crop, the response time-the time between when farmers ask for water and when it arrives-would have to be very short, because paddy yields fall off sharply if water supply is below potential evapotranspiration; and this would call for very high quality management and communications. Thirdly, in the first season, when canal water supplements rainfall, it is difficult for farmers to know the value of canal water much in advance, so the quantities demanded may fluctuate greatly within short periods depending on rainfall, making main system operation more difficult. Finally, one should remember that nowhere in Asia has volumetric pricing o f water been adopted; not even in Taiwan where canal management and water use is said to be much more effective than in India [Levine, 1977].A second line o f solution is to inspect, audit, check and double-check the Irrigation Department, by giving the Indian Administrative Service more control over it and by giving stronger powers to the Anti-Corruption Bureau and Vigilance Cell; these measures would be coupled with stricter definition of the rights and duties of officials, and stronger complaints procedures before a strengthened Administrative Tribunal. Suffice it to say that this is a familiar direction o f administrative reform in India, especially popular in the eyes of Indian Administrative Service officers; but on its own it is unlikely to make matters better and may make matters worse-a stronger Adminis­trative Tribunal, for example, would quite possibly be engulfed in a mass of litigation which the Indian judicial process is ill-equipped to handle.A third line of solution seems more promising. It would attempt to strengthen the user side o f the irrigator-official relation, both by the familiar device o f user organisation-councils o f irrigators covering 20 or so villages, or a Section, for example-and by monitoring of the performance o f each canal system by an independent monitoring organisation whose reports would be made public [Wade, 1980a, 1982a; Seckler, 1981]. Aerial or satellite photography could help to make the monitoring objective. Oppor­tunities for the exercise of ‘voice’, if coupled with a non-partisan source of information, could be much more effective in curbing the arbitrary exercise of authority than the record o f government-sponsored ‘cooperatives’ in India would lead one to expect.This strengthening o f the user side might be supplemented by two other sorts o f measures, one o f which has to do with the work motivation of canal managers. It is difficult to see how a closer link can be made between

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