Hydrological Consequences of Agrarian Change

Abstract

The availability of water for irrigation has long been a severe constraint on the development of agriculture in the dry areas of South Asia. This is especially true for the dry, non-deltaic rice-growing areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. As in many other areas of India the extraction of groundwater has played a prominent part in bringing the Green Revolution to the North Arcot District (see above, pp. 117–18 and 124–7), so that demands on groundwater resources represent an important effect of recent agrarian changes. In most research on the Green Revolution attention has been focused only on economic and social repercussions. Our project made an attempt also to assess some of the important hydrological consequences of recent developments: consequences which in turn have implications for the present and future potential for rice cultivation in North Arcot.