Rural electrification expansion and its role in shaping agriculture and food security in India

Land and freshwater are two finite resources essential for food production under threat from climate change. These threats are in addition to the current growing competition for both. We need to optimize our consumption of both land and freshwater to ensure sustainable and equitable food security in the near and long terms. Globally groundwater accounts for a large portion of freshwater accessible for irrigation. It is being intensively extracted with the result that aquifers are facing multiple challenges of depletion, salinization and pollution across different parts of the world. India is the largest consumer of groundwater, annually consuming in excess of the US and China combined. Cheap electricity and government backed purchase guarantees for cereal and grain production have created misaligned incentives to extract groundwater in excess of its annual rate of replenishment. Yet there still remain large parts across the country that are unirrigated despite healthy groundwater levels. Similar cases exist for vast parts across the African tropics. Rapid expansion of electricity infrastructure in the past decade has the potential to enable economical groundwater pumping for irrigation. However, lacking is a framework to analyse incentives promoting groundwater extraction commensurate with its availability and maximizing its nutritional impacts. In my dissertation I explore different electrification strategies which enable (or in some cases restrict) groundwater pumping for irrigation. I isolate the factors that influence the observed pattern of groundwater irrigation in India and find that electricity access and supply are among the most important factors determining where and how much groundwater is consumed. I trace the evolution of Indian rural electrification to understand why electricity serves agriculture by enabling groundwater irrigation only in some parts of India not others. I find that targeting electricity access solely through household electrification is limiting spillovers towards income generation activities such as groundwater pumping. Finally, I create a framework to estimate the biophysical and economical feasibility of groundwater expansion through different energy provision models in one Indian state with currently low groundwater irrigation coverage. I find that aquifer properties are more important than the cumulative stock of groundwater in assessing biophysical and economic feasibility of groundwater irrigation. Aquifer properties can also act as natural barriers of excessive extraction and therefore need to be considered in policies on groundwater irrigation. Across my dissertation chapters I find unintended policy consequences leading to regional and social inequities in groundwater irrigation access. I also find that the scope to address these inequities exists while ensuring the maintenance of current and future balance between groundwater recharge and pumping. More broadly, I find that the current approach of measuring rural electrification using household electrification may be inadvertently restricting income-enhancing uses of electricity such as groundwater pumping

Advisor: Benson Sally 
Naylor Rosamond
Kolstad Charles D.