9-Social and Economic Dimensions of Ground Water Development in India.

Abstract

This paper markes three proposition about the perspective of ground water development in India : (a) the yet unexploited ground water potenial in India offers a major opportunity to reduce absolute and relative rural income disparities (b) the existing framework and instruments of policy by themselves are inadequate to either achieve equity or to contain the external diseconomies associated with unregulated private exploitation of this resource (c) the current thinking and policy on ground water development completely ignore the potency of locallised but pervasive ground water markets as instruments of equity as well as control. The paper goes on to summarise such empirical evidence as is available from various parts of the country in an attempt to understand how such markets work and how they can be used to achieve the goals of equity and control by managing a limited number of policy variables which are subject to public control.