The ecological basis of irrigation institutions: East and South Asia

Pergamon World Development, Vol. 23, No. 12, pp. 2041-2049, 1995

Copyright 0 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

0305-750x/95 $9.50 + 0.00

The Ecological Basis of Irrigation Institutions:

East and South Asia

ROBERT WADE* Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, U.K.

Summary. - The form and operation of canal irrigation institutions are strongly conditioned by a small set of ecological variables. The paper shows that contrasts and similarities in irrigation institutions between East Asia and South Asia can be related to differences and similarities in these variables. It also suggests that the tendency of social scientists and environmentalists to overlook ecological conditions can impair the usefulness of their policy suggestions on appropriate irrigation institutions.

1 INTRODUCTION (a) Population density

“Irrigation institutions and organisation are in part a response to the physical and natural habitats in which they occur,” says Coward (1980, p. 22). Yet while social science writings on irrigation institutions often acknowledge this point, they often treat the habitat simply as context - as, to quote Leach, “merely a passive backcloth to social life” (1961, p. 306). The ways in which irrigation institutions and organization are to be understood as a “response” to their habitat remain unexplored. In practice the explanation tends to fit the “social facts require a social explanation” mold, as suggested by Kelly’s claim, “the facts of water are cultural facts, not natural facts” (1980a).l In this paper I illustrate how a small number of “ecological” variables can be useful in the comparative study of canal irrigation institutions. The aim is to show that one can get a good way toward an understanding of why country X has irrigation institutions of type A, while country Y has irrigation institutions of type B, simply by using readily available ecological data.

2. THE VARIABLES

The independent ecological variables refer to: (a) population density; (b) irrigation requirement; (c) temperature constraints on crop growing period; (d) topography. Of these I emphasize (a) and (b), because comparative statistics are readily available for them and they thereby make an easy starting point.

The need for irrigation is related to population density. Where density is low the response to inade- quate soil moisture is likely to be extensive (rainfed) farming systems, with long fallows during which soil moisture reserves are built up from rainfall. In this way the sparse population can be fed without capital investment in land improvement and without the additional work load which irrigation entails. As population density increases, rainfed land is likely to be used more intensively and irrigation is likely to spread over larger areas (Boserup, 1970,198l).

(b) Irrigation requirement

The amount of irrigation needed to bring a crop to harvest depends on local rainfall and soil moisture reserves, on the one hand, and on potential evapotranspiration (PET), on the other. PET is the water poten- tially evaporated from the leaves of a crop and from the land or water it is growing in. When total water supply (rainfall, soil moisture, irrigation) is enough to satisfy PET, plant growth is at or near its maximum, other inputs held constant (Levine, 1977).

An index of irrigation requirement can be derived by comparing rainfall with PET: the greater the short-

*Final revision accepted: May 30, 1995.

2041

2042 WORLD DEVELOPMENT

fall of rainfall in relation to PET the greater the irrigation requirement.* Two situations might be distin- guished. Where average rainfall is equal to or greater than PET, irrigation can still be valuable as an insur- ance against occasional bad seasons (or intraseasonal distribution); but users generally do not depend heav- ily on the irrigation system. Where average rainfall is less than average PET, irrigation is a necessity for ade- quate harvests even in normal years; so user dependence is high.

Rainfall minus PET is only an index, however, not an exact measure, because (1) the volume needed from irrigation has to be greater than the amount needed by the crop, to allow for seepage, evaporation, and management “waste”, (ii) some of the crop water requirement may be provided from soil moisture reserves; and (iii) some of the rainfall will be lost to the crop through run-off.3

The great advantage of the simple index is that it can be readily calculated for most parts of the world from published meteorological data.

(c) Temperature

Temperature is the limiting constraint on whether one, two or three sequential crops a year are possible; and thus on the amount of irrigation which is needed. Lower temperatures make for a longer growth period per crop. Temperatures below freezing point preclude crop growth altogether.

Where topography is sloping, or hills are in close proximity to plains, local storage reservoirs are feasible. Where slopes are small (less than about 1:800) and the unbroken area extensive, water must be brought in from long distances. (For simplicity I ignore ground water.)

The dependent variables refer to the form and operation of canal irrigation institutions. “Form” of irrigation institution refers to two basic types: the decentralized watershed-based agency; and the centralized state-based irrigation department, head- quartered in the capital city and with subordinate divi- sions responsible for specific canal facilities. The “operation” of irrigation institutions refers first to the extent of “rule-boundness” in the allocation of water within the system and the extent to which the rules manifest a concern to avoid wasting water, and second to the source of the budget of the organization, whether from farmer’s water payments or from a central government grant.

3. COUNTRY COMPARISONS

The conjunction of the independent variables can be used to help understand cross-country variations in the dependent variables. To illustrate the argument I take five countries from East and South Asia: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India and Sri Lanka. All are irrigation-intensive countries. They are too few to in any sense test the argument, but they are sufficient to illustrate the approach.

Table 1 gives population density per square kilo- meter for the five countries.

Table 2 gives long-run monthly rainfall (P)4 and potential evapotranspiration (PET) averages for meteorological stations in the five countries; Figure 1 graphs the figures for South Korea and the South Indian uplands.

(a) Japan

In terms of monthly averages, rainfall in Japan is greater than PET in every month except July and August (see Table 2). Outside the very south of the country, only one irrigated crop a year is climatically possible, in a growing season from April to October. The deficit of rainfall thus comes in the middle of the growing season, at the crucial time of grain-filling, when water stress has a sharp effect on yield. Water is also likely to be scarce at the start of the growing season if the rainy season begins later than normal; for the relatively long growing season required by Japanese conditions of temperature and sunlight cannot be delayed for late-starting rains, because of frost risk at

Table 1. Population density, around 1970

Area

(sq. km.) Population

(000) Population

sq. kin.

Japan 372,080 104,403 281 (1872) (372,080) (34,810) (93)

T&/all 35,981 16,508* 459 India 3,268,090 538,881 16.5 Sri Lanka 65,610 12,603 192

Source: FAO Production Yearbook (1972); Japan’s 1872 population (Government of Japan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1961). p. 18; Philips Universal Encyclopaedia (Taiwan, 1979). Boserup scale of population density ranges from zero to 10, eight being 64-128 Persons per square kilometre, nine being 128-256, 10 being 256-512 (Boserup, 1981). Of course, a less crude measure of population density would be desirable, especially one for irrigated areas only. Such data are hard to find. *Taiwan population, 1976.

ECOLOGICAL BASIS OF IRRIGATION INSTITUTIONS 2043

Table 2. Thomthwaite’s long-run monthly averages for rainfall (P) and potential evapotranspiration (PET), in mm.

Japan P PET

P-PET Taiwan P PET

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Ott Nov Dee Total

42 75 98 144 118 189 130 134 221 215 97 62 1525 4 6 19 47 83 115 161 157 110 65 31 11

38 69 79 97 35 74 -31 -23 111 150 66 51

9 33 72 88 140 450 712 467 128 33 7 20 2159 40 41 65 106 160 167 174 166 149 125 81 52

P-PET

South Korea P PET

-31 -8 7 -18 -20 283 538 301 -21 -92 -74 -32

22 24 37 77 82 127 343 243 131 37 47 30 1184 0 0 8 42 84 119 154 151 94 50 15 0

P-PET

South India P PET

22 24 29 35 -2 8 173 92 37 -13 -32 30

5 5 15 25 25 114 163 163 180 79 33 5 812 66 102 157 177 198 171 157 145 130 126 80 56

P-PET Sri Lanka P PET

41 -97 -142 -152 -173 -57 6 18 50 -47 -47 -51

147 43 107 163 89 18 33 41 97 246 272 190 1446 100 108 147 154 163 159 163 161 155 145 123 102

P-PET -47 -65 -40 9 -74 -141 -130 -120 -58 101 149 88

Source: C. W. Thomthwaite Publications in Climatology (1963). Stations: Japan-Tokyo; Taiwan-Tainan; South Korea-Suwon; South India-Hyderabad; Sri Lanka-Anaradhapura.

the other end. Hence a common reason for not grow- narrow. The restricted area of plains, coupled with ing a second (unitrigated) crop in the past was the ample yearly rainfall, made both necessary and practice of keeping the field undrained through the feasible relatively small-scale systems. Few canal winter in order to conserve water in it. systems command more than 10,000 hectares.5

One would anticipate, therefore, that with average rainfall relatively evenly distributed over the year (compared to all the other countries) but inade- quate during two critical months of the growing season and sometimes at the start of the growing season as well, the spread of paddy cultivation would require the creation of physical structures to store and distribute rainfall, and to control and direct the flow of rivers.

By the 19th century Japan’s population density was already high and rising: available estimates suggest that by about 1870 density was well within Boserup’s class 8 (Table 1). The response was to intensify agriculture, partly by building irrigation canals. In fact, even before the middle of the 19th century the main outline of Japan’s present-day irrigation networks had already been laid, and use of sophisticated storage and control structures became common wherever rice was grown (Sawada, 1972; Ishikawa, 1967; Ogura, 1968; Akino, 1979).

Being small in area and in number of farmers they could be managed by the irrigators themselves or by employees responsible to and paid by them. Hence Japan’s irrigation institutions take the form of the watershed-based irrigation association. As population density increased, water allocation within each system came to be governed by increasingly complex and precisely specified rules (Beardsley et al., 1959; Eyres, 1955; Kelly, 1980a). As a unitary state was forged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries several ordinances and laws covering the structure of irrigation associations were adopted at national level, draw- ing on and making uniform practices which had evolved autonomously in independent irrigation associations (Ogura, 1968)?

(b) Taiwan

The country’s geography has little to compare with the great flood plains of some other parts of Asia; on the contrary, plains and valleys tend to be fairly

Most irrigation in Taiwan is concentrated on the westerly plains. Here average monthly rainfall falls short of average crop water requirement in every month of the year except March, which in places

WORLD DEVELOPMENT

0 Jan Fob Mar Apr May Jm Jul Aupw=t Nov Dot

---c-P

- PET

south lndk

-P I -PET

J8n FOb Mar Apr May Jun Jrl Aug Sap 0~4 Nov Dee

Figure 1. Rainfall (P) andpotential evapotranspiration (PET) in South Korea and South India. Source: Table 2.

shows a small surplus, and in June, July, and August, which show very large surpluses. Taiwan has two main growing seasons, in both of which rice is the dominant crop: a ‘dry” season from December to June, and a “wet” season from June to October (in the southerly part of the island warmer winter temperatures make available a brief third season between October and December). To make use of the long annual growing period which temperatures permit, the

surplus of rainwater over need in June to August has to be stored and used at others time of year, by means of reservoirs and canals.

Population density in Taiwan is the highest of our five countries. The impetus to the spread of irrigation came not only from high and rising population pressure, however, but also - at this point we have to start adding nonecological variables - from Japanese demand for food during Taiwan’s period as a Japanese


colony (1895-1945). The Japanese had an important role in promoting the spread of irrigation in order to boost rice exports to Japan. Given population- and Japanese-induced demand for rice, water stored during the months of surplus rainfall plus the residual flows in rivers had to be carefully used so as to cover as large an area as possible with enough irrigation to meet crop water requirement over the rest of the year.

The area of contiguous plains is larger than in Japan, permitting larger systems. Taiwan has a few canals of more than 50,000 hectares, but none of more than 100,000 hectares.

As in Japan they are managed by water-shed based organizations (VenderMeer, 1968). Indeed the organizational form, and the details of organizational design and operating procedures, were imported from Japan during the colonial period. But the ecological conditions were such that similar irrigation institutions would have evolved even without the direct Japanese import.

Taiwan’s canal systems are said to be among the most efficient gravity-flow open channel systems in the world (measuring efficiency in terms of the per- centage of the water released into the head of the system which ends up in the crop root zone) (Levine, 1977). This is not due to excellent physical structures; the quality of the hardware is not especially high - much of the network is not concrete lined and gates are manually operated. It is due more to good management. The introduction of “rotational irrigation” techniques in the 1950s (in response to an island-wide drought) was important in enabling existing water supplies to be “stretched’ over more land. These techniques required an effective liaison mechanism between farmers and irrigation staff (Levine, 1977; Levine, Chin and Miranda, 1976).

(c) South Korea

In South Korea only one irrigated crop a year is possible for climatic reasons, as in Japan; but in con- trast to Japan there is an average monthly surplus of rainfall over crop need in all months of the growing season except in places in May (when the average deficit is small, and can be covered not only by irrigation but also by moisture retained in the soil during the winter). The surpluses of rainfall are especially large during the crucial grain-filling stage of crop growth. The irrigation requirement, therefore, is relatively small compared to Japan and Taiwan.

Yet about one million hectares are irrigated, virtually all under rice. Why? First, because actual rainfall falls below average rainfall some of the time, and insuring against rainfall deficits has been given high value both by the colonial Japanese government and by subsequent Korean governments. (The value reflects not only narrowly economic criteria, but also,

since Independence, the importance attached to mini- mizing rural discontent.) A second reason is the importance of drainage in this “heavy rainfall during the growth season” environment; canal systems include channels not only for bringing water in but also for taking water out.

With average rainfall abundant even during the growing season and topography even more dissected into small basins and narrow plains than in Japan and Taiwan, canal systems in South Korea are in normal times not short of water; land rather than water is the constraint on irrigated area. Canal systems are small, as in Japan, with few of more than 10,000 hectares. They are operated by a similar type of watershed- based management institution as in Japan and Taiwan, also imported by the Japanese colonial government. But while the institutional form is similar, the operating procedures are distinctly less efficient; for exam- ple, the techniques of rotational irrigation so highly developed in Taiwan are virtually unknown. Programs for improving existing irrigation systems emphasize hardware - concrete lining, expansion of reservoirs, more pump stations - and neglect improvements in canal operation (Wade, 1982a, and 1982d; Oh, 1978). Given that the irrigation requirement is not high and that the drainage function does not require active management, it is not surprising that management of irrigation in South Korea is less highly developed than in Japan or Taiwan, even though population density is high and even though the Japanese colonial administration tried to intensify agriculture to provide food exports to Japan, as in Taiwan.

The main tension between management and farmers focuses on water rates. Management gives great attention to ensuring that farmers pay quickly, using a variety of incentive and coercive methods for getting them to do so. Their own salaries are at stake (Wade, 1982d).

(d) India

India is of course too ecologically varied to be taken as a single unit, even for the sorts of broad char- acterizations given here. Our discussion refers to the relatively dry parts of India, such as the Deccan Plateau and the alluvial plains of the Northwest. Here rainfall is likely to fall well short of PET in most months of the year, while temperatures permit crops to be grown throughout the year. At the same time, the total amount of rainfall is much less than in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, making the use of local reservoirs (called “tanks”) less reliable (von Oppen and Subba Rao, 1980). If irrigation is to be provided much of the water must be brought in from outside the dry zones themselves, either from rivers which have their sources in areas of heavy rainfall, from snowmelt


or from reservoirs fed from such rivers. The large expanses of flat land (compared to East Asia) make it possible for a single source to irrigate a relatively very large area. Indian canal systems are thus likely to be large; a single source irrigating 200,000 hectares is not uncommon (Vander Velde, 1980).

Hence the characteristic difference between Indian canals and East Asian canals. Indian ones tend to be large in area (and in number of farmers), with a single water source at one end. East Asian canals tend not only to be much smaller but to consist of linked agglomerations of even smaller reservoir/canal systems, each of which may provide buffer supplies for some of the others.

Consider the following two canals, one in South Korea, the other in south India. The South Korean system (called SY Farmland Improvement Association, or SY FLIA), has a gross irrigated area of 11,200 hectares, and is supplied by four main reservoirs and 13 small reservoirs, some of which are interlinked. The total length of each main canal ranges from 27 to 36 kilometers. In terms of irrigated area it is among the biggest 5% of canal systems in the country. The south Indian system (MN Canal) has a gross irrigated area of 128,000 hectares, is fed by a single source, a river (which is itself controlled by an upstream reservoir), and has a single main stem 300 kilometers long. Data with which it could be ranked against other Indian canals in terms of size are not available; suffice to say there are many systems with an irrigated area over twice as large.

Given that a large part of Indian irrigated area is under large-scale canals, it is not surprising that the characteristic institutional form for canal management is not the watershed-based irrigation agency of East Asia, but the state-based irrigation department. It would be more difficult to operate and maintain large- scale systems by means of an irrigation agency in which beneficiaries share out the costs and at least in principle have some say in the policy decision making (including employment of staff), than it is in the much smaller, operationally more transparent East Asian systems.

At the same time, population density in India is relatively low, the lowest of the five countries, and agricultural intensification has proceeded less far than in all three East Asian cases. Despite high irrigation requirement the effectiveness of canal operating procedures is low (outside Punjab-Haryana). Canals are run according to a continuous flow delivery rule, and systematic rotational delivery is uncommon. The principles for adjusting water delivery rules for varying degrees of water scarcity, which are highly developed in Japan and Taiwan (and also in south-eastern Spain; see Maass and Anderson, 1978), are uncodified and rudimentary. At the same time, once farmers become dependent on canal water their dependence is extremely high.

Hence one understands why, in the India/South Korea comparison, there is much more bribery and extortion in India, why broken water gates (broken so that farmers get more water through their outlets) are much more common. The Indian irrigators’ need for water is much greater, the likelihood of long lags in the receipt of water in tail-end areas much higher. Conversely, the greater “rule boundedness” of South Korean irrigators cannot be understood simply as a consequence of the greater coercive power of the South Korean state; it is also a consequence of the smaller irrigation requirement and the smaller size of systems (see Wade citations at end; Seckler, 1981; Pant, 1979; Chambers, 1988).

(e) Sri Lanka

The discusion is confined to the Dry Zone. Here the main cropping season is October to March (the irrigated area in the minor season from April to August is small). During the main growing season rainfall is in substantial surplus over PET for all months except the last two. The total volume of water falling during the rainy season is such as to make local reservoirs more reliable than in India, and the Dry Zone is not (or was not, before the gigantic, recently constructed Mahaweli diversion scheme) served by any sizeable rivers. For both reasons canal systems are typically of much smaller size than India’s, based on tanks.

The “traditional” organization under tanks cen- tered on the “farmers’ meeting,” open to all beneficiaries, at which the major decisions (such as when to start releasing the water) were taken, then to be imple- mented by a water master (vel vedane). At some point in the second half of the 19th century it became customary for the government agent to chair meetings under the bigger tanks - presumably an articulation which occurred at about the same time the govem- ment became extensively involved in the rehabilita- tion of the bigger tanks (Roberts, 1967). Today, the national irrigation department operates the bigger tanks, but the key decisions are still to be taken by the farmers’ meeting under the supervision of the govem- ment agent (for a big command area there may be several meetings, one for each section). In short, the form of organization is intermediate between the irrigation associations of East Asia and the irrigation departments of India, and less institutionalized than in East Asia.

In Sri Lankan climatic conditions, it is not very difficult to store sufficient water in the first four (average) months to tide over rainfall deficits in the last two. Moreover, population density is light by East Asian standards. Correspondingly, irrigation management techniques are poorly developed (Moore, 1980). For the same reasons corruption - the manipulation

of water deliveries so as to raise illicit money from irrigators-is of little significance compared to India, for irrigators’ dependence on and fear of non-arrival of canal water is less acute (Moore, personal communication; Wade, 1982~).

4. CONCLUSIONS

Population density affects positively the size of irrigated area, the number of irrigators, the intensity of irrigation, the intensity of management effort to allocate water, and the intensity of irrigators’ efforts to privilege their own local supply by breaking the rationing rules. Where density is relatively light, one would expect relatively little area under irrigation, an unintensive use of irrigation, little management effort to stretch water over a large area, and few attempts by users to short-circuit whatever rules of water allocation exist. As density increases, one expects an upward trend in all these variables. Judging from our small sample it would seem that the difference between Boserup’s class 9 population density and class 10 is very significant for irrigation institutions.

Given a certain population pressure-related “need for irrigation,” the irrigation requirement and topography are important influences on the form that ini- gation institutions will take. Where the annual rainfall is ample in relation to PET and irrigation is required mainly to make up for deficits during the growing season(s), small local reservoirs and canal systems, poss- ibly interlinked, are likely to be found; all the more so if topography makes land rather than water the constraint on irrigated area. Small systems with a relatively small number of irrigators per system are likely

ECOLOGICAL BASIS OF IRRIGATION INSTITUTIONS 204-l

to be run by watershed-based agencies, rather than by centralized irrigation departments.

The attraction of this argument is its parsimony. It shows how one can quickly get a sense of the broad ecological constraints within which irrigation institutions evolve. That being done, we have delimited the room for nonecological variables.’

Most of the sociological and anthropological liter- ature about irrigation, at least within Asia, is about small-scale systems in the semi-humid topics. The consequences of the semi-humid environment and of prevailing levels of population density for the form and operation of irrigation institutions are not exam- ined. When confronted with the organizational defi- ciencies of large-scale canals in the low density semi- arid or arid tropics, anthropologists and sociologists (joined these days by “green-is-small” environmentalists) are likely to react by saying (a) that future irrigation expansion should be small scale (because of a cli- mateless and density-less sense of the organizational virtues of small scale per se) - even where the ecology severely limits the potential of small-scale surface systems; and(b) that what works well under small systems (outlet-based irrigator groups and the like) should be implanted under large systems. In so argu- ing they overlook the qualitative difference in the con-

text of farmers’ behavior as between small-scale,

communal systems in the semi-humid tropics, and large-scale, government-operated systems of the semi-arid tropics - a difference likely to make the application of organizational principles derived from the first context arduous in the second (Bottrall, 198 1; Chambers, 1988; Spooner, 1974; Netting, 1974: Wade, 1976,1982, 1988).

NOTES

1. The papers in the collection edited by Downing and Gibson (1974) provide several exceptions - notably those by Downing, and Hunt and Hunt. Both these latter papers are exceptional in attempting to link irrigation institutions to (among other things) a quantitative measure of “irrigation requirement.” Hunt and Hunt give data on monthly averages for rainfall and potential evapotranspiration for their Mexican case study. Yet it is striking that in a later paper (1976) which aims to make general statements about the connections between canal irrigation and local social organization, they do not explore the relevance of such data for understanding local irrigation institutions, although world- wide data are readily available.

2. The meaning of “requirement” needs clarification. What is “required,” in the sense used here, is the amount of water needed in addition to rainfall to bring total water supply to the crop to PET level; at which the crop-water production function will be at a maximum (Levine, 1977). But if an individual irrigator has extra land available to be irr-

gated, he may apply less than the “requirement,” in this sense, to any one field and use the saved water to irrigate land which would otherwise go without. If the layout of the scheme is such that individual irrigators could not use saved water on their own land, it may still make good economic sense for the scheme management to allocate existing irrigators less than the “requirement” and send the saved water to other areas. The existing irrigators, however, are likely to strongly oppose such efforts, whether by direct methods such as breaking open the water gates or by indirect methods of influence with local-level officials; and irrigation water allocation will tend to move to “requirement” levels.

3. So one should distinguish between total rainfall and effective rainfall, the latter being less than the former by an amount determined by factors such as slope, depth of water table and forestation. As further qualification, in northerly latitudes (e.g., northern half of Japan, most of the Korean peninsula) winter precipitation comes as snow, which acts as natural local water storage in the early part of the growing


season. (Partly for this reason, one would more exactly speak of “precipitation”; I use “rainfall” for simplicity.) A more exact indicator of irrigation requirement would take account of such factors as snowfall, soil water infiltration rate, and soil moisture retentiveness; but to do so would not alter the broad-brush conclusions about the degree and seasonal inci- dence of irrigation requirement which can be inferred from the simple “rainfall minus PET” index.

4. P stands for the more general term, precipitation. See note 3.

5. The Minumadai Irrigation Canal (officially the Minuma Land Improvement District), in Kanto region, is one of the biggest in Japan, at 13,000 hectares. Japan has 9147 Land Improvement Districts (LIDS), 69% of which are con- cerned primarily with water control (irrigation and drainage) in wet-rice areas. Within the beneficiary area of Minumadai there are an additional 74 separate, independently operated LIDS, 25 of which are engaged in water control (Latz, 1986).

6. The central government entered the field of irrigation administration with the Irrigation Association Law in 1890. Irrigation Associations (suin’ kumiai) became the organs through which subsidies for irrigation and land improvement could be obtained. They tended to be formed, in this formal,

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7. Take the case of Sri Lanka to illustrate some of the complexities. It is puzzling that Sri Lanka, which is a big net grain importer and is short of foreign exchange, has shown little interest in improving the performance of canal agriculture. As in India, if “efficiency” in the main season were improved, much more area could be put under irrigation in what is now the minor season, using saved water. Perhaps the reason has to do with the fact that governments are sensitive to the foreign exchange constraint, while people are sensitive, so to speak, to population pressure. Perhaps canal-operating procedures in Sri Lanka and India may be expected to remain in their present poor state until population density reaches higher levels, unless the government makes the improvement of these procedures a matter of high priority. In any case, it is a pertinent question how successful govem- ment-sponsored canal management improvement efforts can be at Indian or Sri Lankan levels of population density; or more analytically, how much can balance-of-payments pressures prompt an improvement in canal operating procedures, compared to the effect of rising population density.

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Documents

The ecological basis of irrigation institutions: East and South Asia