Groundwater policies and irrigation development: a study of West Bengal, India, 1980-2016

After a prolonged agrarian impasse, agricultural production in West Bengal, India, grew at an unprecedented rate in the 1980s, a process in which the expansion of groundwater irrigation played an important role. The growth of groundwater irrigation and agricultural production, however, decelerated from the early 1990s. This paper argues that the deceleration in groundwater irrigation development in West Bengal since 1995 is primarily attributed to the adoption of different regulatory policies in two ways: directly, through controlling the overall installation of tubewells or decelerating tubewell electrification; and indirectly, through high electricity pricing for water use in agriculture.