Mr. Gopal Chavan will present his Ph.D. viva-voce examination as per the detail:
Date: 25th November 2022
Time: 1350-1500 hrs.
Venue: CTARA Conference Room No.1
Title: Improving Water Accounting Processes in State Agencies: Contexts and Methods
Supervisor: Prof. Milind Sohoni, CSE
Internal Examiner: Prof. Amit Arora, CTARA
External Examiner: Dr. Sanjay Belsare, Chief Engineer, North Maharashtra Region, Water Resources Department, Maharashtra.
Chairman: Prof. Mohanty Raja, IDC
Abstract:
Maharashtra has significantly advanced irrigation infrastructure and administration as compared to other states of India. And yet, the irrigation system faces problems of sustainability, great iniquity in allocations, large deviations in cropping patterns, and poor performance. This thesis examines the problems of command and non-command areas in Maharashtra from the point of view of operational, scientific, and institutional processes at the project, village, minor, and farm scale.
Numerous institutional studies and narratives have examined these issues of irrigation systems from various perspectives. From this, we identify two important threads. One thread is the low efficiency of the public irrigation system and its connection with the difficulties in assessing their performance. The second thread is about water accounting and assessment initiatives of state agencies for the command and non-command areas. In order to understand the aforementioned problems related to irrigation systems and solutions thereof, we study relevant literature, project reports, policy, and practice documents and conduct extensive fieldwork in different agro-climatic zones of Maharashtra.
Based on this, we outline three contexts to understand the issues raised by researchers and those reported by farmers, viz., importance of measurements and estimation of water availability and accounting at various scales; operational issues of actual water distribution; and inadequate formal mechanisms for farmers’ participation and effective functioning of irrigation systems. We find that it is critical to strengthen and localize existing water accounting frameworks to address issues of unequal water allocation at the various levels.
Water accounting and auditing is indeed a suitable framework to address issues at the local scale. We adopt a supply-demand-allocation framework, developed water balance (WB) methods, perform water availability assessments for each scale, and map these into existing procedures and formats. This has helped in identifying the allocational problems and linking them to concrete and actionable tasks. The important contributions of our work are to describe these allocations in terms of existing operational and scientific processes and to provide detailed procedures to undertake water budgeting exercises at different scales.
Our section-wise water budgeting exercise for projects has given a framework to quantify and include informal allocations of canal water in the different parts of the command area for any irrigation project. The framework incorporates several scientific processes and the accounting of local hydrological and biophysical parameters. Such an exercise for any project area would be useful for preparing maps showing spatial-temporal and supply-demand variations compared to the detailed project report.
Such maps will help in mobilizing all irrigation project stakeholders to participate in planning of irrigation rotation and cropping patterns. It can help the water resource department (WRD) to locate regions of heavy leakage and formalize groundwater use to improve revenue. The community (WUAs) can also use water budgeting exercises to assess internal and project-level water audits and accounting to address the distribution issues.
At the village level, we have divided the village into zones as per the micro-watersheds within it and computed a separate zonal WB. We propose zonal and village level indicators emerging from this exercise to guide intervention planning which may be used for the selection of beneficiaries for various government schemes. The village-level WB can help in the simultaneous operation of regional irrigation infrastructures for regional water security.
The minor-level WB documents and combines various accounting processes, procedures, and practices. In this context, we have proposed, demonstrated, and applied the crop-wise Unit Farm WB concept to incorporate the interplay of SW and GW. Unit farms document irrigation practices in the particular regions of the command area and quantify the various stocks and flow in the irrigation system. This, and our budget framework brings agricultural, WRD, and GSDA departments on one platform so as to better integrate local programs for improving irrigation system performance.
The localization allows for case studies of villages and minors, region-specific scientific investigations into poor allocations, and the use of modern analysis tools to generate datasets, evidence, and knowledge base. We believe these are the pathways by which better decisions may be made. Such case studies provide a path for regional higher education institutions to engage with the wide range of problems encompassing the development sector. A welcome step was taken by WRD by enacting a GR on 12th April 2021, to involve the local academic institutions to do research for WRD. Our zonal water accounting framework is subsumed in the project on climate resilient agriculture (PoCRA), a World Bank-funded project of the Government of Maharashtra is being implemented in 15 districts of Maharashtra.