Kishore, Avinash
[VerfasserIn]
;
Dizon, Felipe
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft];
Gupta, Manavi
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft];
Kumar, Priti
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]
An Assessment of Community-Led Lift Irrigation Systems in Jharkhand, India
Beschreibung:
The Jharkhand State Livelihoods Promotion Society is rolling-out solar powered community lift irrigation systems to provide access to irrigation to 23,580 farming families in 13 districts of the state. This paper assesses these irrigation systems using data collected from 297 farmers in the command area of 50 randomly selected irrigation systems. The study also interviewed 457 nonbeneficiaries. Farmers in the command area of the irrigation systems irrigate more land, have higher cropping intensity, are more likely to grow high-value crops, and had higher gross value of output in the Rabi (winter) season. The beneficiaries also spend less money on irrigation, especially compared with nonbeneficiaries who use their own or who rent diesel pumps to irrigate their fields. Although the solar powered community lift irrigation systems offer multiple benefits, they remain severely underutilized. The median hours of operation of the 50 sampled irrigation systems was less than 100 hours per year, and the average operating time was 192 hours per year. Solar irrigation systems cannot be economically viable with low levels of capacity utilization, indicating that incentives are needed for system managers to increase utilization, gross irrigated area, and irrigation surplus