Paddy, Power and a Falling Water Table

The chain, link by link:

1. Institutional: assured procurement at MSP fixes a floor under paddy returns and makes it the lowest-risk crop in the block.
2. Institutional → agronomic: 92% of net sown area goes into a water-intensive rotation, because every alternative carries market risk the farmer cannot absorb.
3. Institutional: canal supply lasts only ~45 days in kharif, so the crop's water requirement must be met from groundwater.
4. Institutional: unmetered power with a flat annual fee makes each additional unit of pumped water effectively free at the margin - the price signal that would ration abstraction is absent.
5. Physical: 12,000 tube-wells (one per 1.8 ha) abstract more than recharge, and the water table falls from 12 m to 28 m.
6. Physical → institutional: deeper water raises the energy cost per unit lifted, and the share of wells needing 150-foot-plus pumps rises from 6% to 31%. Farmers then need paddy's assured return to service the sunk cost of the pump - the lock-in closes.

Diagnosis: every institutional link rewards the same behaviour, and the physical link merely transmits the consequence. This is not a farmer-failure story; the incentives are doing exactly what they were designed to do, with an unintended outcome.

Direct payment (₹7,000/ha for land shifted out of paddy).

• Effectiveness: targeted and quick to announce, but it pays for a land-use decision rather than an outcome; nothing guarantees the water saving, and the sum may be pocketed with the rotation unchanged.
• Cost bearer: the state exchequer; the farmer gains.
• Monitoring: hard. With 1.5 ha holdings and 12,000 wells there is no plot-level registry of cropping, so verification is expensive and disputable.

Power metering (₹1.50/unit).

• Effectiveness: attacks the price of the actually scarce input, so it bites on every extra irrigation, not just on the crop choice.
• Cost bearer: the farmer, directly - and tenant farmers and smallholders without the means to invest in saving water are hit hardest unless slabs are used.
• Monitoring: easy and self-verifying, from meter readings.

Sequencing judgement: procurement and storage first, then metering, then a reduced top-up payment. The farmer's own sentence identifies the real block: 'who will buy it?' If maize and pulses have no buyer and no store, no payment will hold a shift in cropping pattern for more than a season. So build the market first, then meter - with a free or near-free basic entitlement and sharply rising rates above it - and recycle the revenue into the procurement and storage that make the switch viable. Reverse the order and compliance collapses politically before the water saving arrives.

Package for a 1.5 ha holding:

1. Shift 0.5 ha (one-third) out of paddy into maize plus a short-duration pulse; retain 1 ha under paddy–wheat for household food security and the assured market. A whole-farm switch is unbankable for this household.
2. Answer the buyer question before sowing. Contract the maize to a local poultry-feed or starch buyer who supplies seed and picks up at the farm gate. The objection is a market objection, so it needs a market fix.
3. Convert the subsidy into a service. The ₹7,000/ha applied to 0.5 ha is about ₹3,500 - too little to change behaviour as cash. Route it instead into a drying/platform arrangement or a storage bag so the maize can be held rather than dumped at harvest.
4. Install a cheap irrigation trigger - a tensiometer or a marked water-level stick on the tube-well - so irrigation follows crop need rather than habit. This is the cheapest water saved per rupee.

Indicator within two seasons: pumping hours per hectare on that holding (metered or reliably estimated), plus whether the maize was sold at or above the MSP-equivalent price. Water-table data respond too slowly to prove anything in two seasons; pumping hours and the sale price respond immediately and are attributable to the package.