Smallholder irrigation is emerging as a development priority in Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on a survey of 1554 smallholders from nine countries, this paper compares rainfed farming with gravity-flow, manual-lift and motor-pump irrigation. Motor-pump-irrigation farmers reported the highest net...

India's 2.25 million ha of village tanks were for centuries loosely managed as multiple-use common property resources, including for fishing by artisanal fisher-folk, the lowest in the social hierarchy. During the 1970s and after, the aquaculture productivity revolution created a vibrant new...

Integrated water resources management provides a set of ideas to help us manage water more holistically. However, these ideas have been formalized over time in what has now become, in capitals, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), with specific prescriptive principles whose...

Gujarat, a rapidly industrializing state in western India, is notorious for groundwater over-exploitation. A perverse link between energy subsidies and groundwater overdraft has left the state with a bankrupt electricity utility and depleted aquifers, especially since the late 1980s. Moreover,...

Summary "Getting prices right" is the silver bullet widely advocated to developing countries in fighting waste, misallocation and scarcity of water. In the vast, poverty-stricken Indo-Gangetic basin, however, high surrogate water price is driving out small-holder irrigation. With rising diesel...