Institutional management regimes for pricing of irrigation water: the French model – lessons for India

In France, the River Basin Committees and Water Agencies are in charge of managing water resources. However, many surface irrigation networks were initiated and operated by the Regional Companies and farmer syndicates exclusively for agricultural development in the southwest of the country. These are water institutions playing an active role in water management with an objective of cost recovery in order to improve the quality of irrigation services to the users. The implementation of various innovative institutional management approaches by these agencies have yielded a modest degree of success in addressing the crucial problems of the irrigation sector in terms of pricing water, cost recovery, financial viability and overall sustainability of the surface irrigation system. This study attempts to examine the relevance of the institutional management approaches of France to the Indian context. The institutional framework for setting the price of irrigation water is through negotiation between the management and the user representatives. The important lessons drawn based on the experiences of the French model include the granting of financial autonomy to the water institutions in order to recover operational and maintenance costs, participatory approaches of decentralised management, user involvement in the decision-making process, devolution of small-scale irrigation networks to the users for management and the promotion of effective and viable user associations with access to technical information relating to the use of irrigation technologies.