Rural Futures

Slightly over half of India’s farmlands have access to irrigation, with the rest depending on increasingly erratic rainfall. With groundwater levels declining in two-thirds of the country’s districts, expanding, or even sustaining, irrigation using dugwells or tubewells is a challenge. Irrigation through canals is an alternative, but they suffer from problems such as leakage and uneven distribution.

Moreover, incomes of rural residents, most of whom depend on farming and allied sectors for their livelihoods, are stagnating or falling. Crops like paddy and wheat offer better returns due to the government’s minimum support prices, but these are water-intensive and grown as large-scale monocultures. In contrast, crops like pulses, oilseeds, millets, etc. receive minimal or no support to become viable income sources for farmers. Besides, monocropping combined with the extensive use of pesticides and fertilisers can lead to land degradation, making agriculture unviable in the long run.

Thus, we need solutions that enable farmers to improve their incomes and also sustain water resources and ecosystems.

We are working in Raichur and Chikkaballapur districts of Karnataka, where we have set up transformation labs under the STEWARDS project. These labs are collaborative spaces where communities can co-develop pathways to sustainable, equitable transitions in water and agriculture to improve resilience in dryland regions.

Our partners include University College London; Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; DCB Bank; Nvidia; IHE Delft; Prarambha; Advanced Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management; and SOIL Trust.

Our initiatives are:

1) Fostering water access and equity through better-governed irrigation in canal command areas.

Canal irrigation can help ensure that farmers have access to enough water during the Kharif season (June–October) and ample soil moisture for a second Rabi season (October–April) crop. However, it poses its own set of challenges. Canal systems are often poorly designed or maintained. On one hand, leakages due to evaporation, seepage, vegetation growth, wastage, etc. reduce the amount of water available for farmers. On the other, head-end farmers use most of the water, leaving little for tail-end farmers.

To ensure water access and equity, we are developing, implementing and socialising design principles for canal-water sharing in association with farmer water groups.

This initiative is being implemented in the parts of Raichur district that receive water from the Narayanpur Right Bank Canal.

A distributary of the Narayanpur Right Bank Canal in Raichur district, Karnataka

2) Promoting protective irrigation in dryland areas.

Rainfed farmers are facing erratic rainfall and long dry spells. Amid changing weather patterns, it is difficult to ensure yields in even one season, leading to losses. We are exploring options to promote protective irrigation using tank water, groundwater and soil moisture management in the drylands of Chikkaballapur and of Raichur, where canal water is not available.

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For both the above interventions, we are documenting marginalised communities’ needs and aspirations regarding water management. We shall use insights from this exercise to build their capacities through initiatives such as community hydrology programmes.

3) Piloting labour-saving technologies to enable diversified cropping.

Diversified cropping requires relatively fewer inputs like fertilisers, pesticides, etc. and also reduces the risk of crop failure. However, we have observed on the field that while monocropping systems have well-developed mechanisation techniques, this is not the case for diversified cropping. The tools tend to be rudimentary, the fields often require manual de-weeding and different crops have to be harvested at different times. Thus, diversified cropping is labour-intensive and women usually have to bear the burden.

To ensure that diversified cropping does not increase farmers’ burden, we are piloting labour-saving technologies (such as manual/electric weeders, EV tractors, harvesters and threshers for pulses, millets and oilseeds, transplanters, seed drills, etc.); training landless farmers to use these; and helping them become entrepreneurs.

Traditional diversified-cropping systems such as Akkadi Salu promote biodiversity and help farmers weather risks such as erratic rainfall, degrading soils and unpredictable markets

4) Facilitating market access to ensure farmers get good prices for their produce and grow diversified crops.

Farmers grow paddy because there is a ready market and a minimum support price offered by the government. Its cultivation ecosystem is well-developed — seeds, pesticides, machines, buyers etc. are in place — which other crops often lack.

Moreover, crops like millets, pulses, and oilseeds do not have an organised market, making it difficult for farmers to get minimum support prices or fair prices at local mandis (markets). Growing large amounts of a non-staple cash crop like chilli or cotton can also lead to a glut in the market and a sudden drop in prices.

We are mapping existing links to markets, barriers to increasing incomes, and current approaches to aggregation, value addition, and procurement contracts to develop and test strategies on improving farmers’ access to markets.

5) Researching the extent of land fragmentation and barriers to the better use of fallow land.

With increasing agrarian distress and aspirational migration to cities, a lot of rural land is left fallow. In some cases, the land has many owners or is locked in legal disputes and thus, there is no investment in land productivity or soil quality.

We are researching the barriers to the productive use of this land — such as concerns that the land could be usurped or the lack of enforceable contracts — and how these can be overcome.