IFPRI Blog / Issue Post / March 2023
40 Years of LEARNING
Revisiting Nepal's Farmer-managed Irrigation Systems
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Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a senior research fellow in the Transformation Strategies division at IFPRI
Nepal has a long history of water management, including both government- and farmer-managed irrigation systems. For years, most of the global research literature assumed that irrigation development was inherently run by the state. But in the 1980s, paradigm-changing work on farmer-managed irrigation systems turned that notion on its head.
Interdisciplinary research conducted by Bob Yoder (an engineer), Ed Martin (an economist), and Ujjwal Pradhan (a sociologist), working with Prachanda Pradhan (a public administration expert), showed that farmers in Nepal could organize themselves and use a high degree of technical skill to construct and maintain these irrigation systems. Although these systems had been operating for many years—centuries, in some cases—they had been virtually invisible to the state and to outsiders.
As a graduate student at the time, I was inspired—in part, by these colleagues—to study how farmers were managing irrigation tanks and other irrigation in India, even in systems that were officially run by the government. This work began my decades-long fascination with how communities manage their water and other resources. More recently, I had the great opportunity to work with Prachanda Pradhan on a study of how these systems have changed with male migration and shifting gender roles.
In April 2022, after attending a workshop for the CGIAR NEXUS Gains Research Initiative in Kathmandu, I had the chance to accompany Prachanda Pradhan, Bob Yoder, and Pravakar Pradhan as they visited some of the irrigation systems they had studied 40 years ago.
Here are a few highlights from our trip
In Argali, the Raj Kulo irrigation system is more than 400 years old. Here, farmers figured out how to design canals to transport water across long distances (more than 10 kilometers, in some cases). They used gravity to divert water from the river to places where they could level the land or construct terraces to grow crops with the water. The canals were built along steep hillsides, with occasional wooden aqueducts or small tunnels over crevasses.
And—no less impressive—the farmers had the organizational capacity to decide how to mobilize their labor, money, and physical resources (like brushwood and boulders). This allowed them to not only build the systems, but also keep them repaired during regular seasons and frequent landslides or other emergencies. Through the farmers’ investments and ongoing management, it became their own system, not a government system.
When we visited Argali, we learned about how the system has changed through conversations with some of the same people whom Bob and Prachanda knew 40 years ago. Through government-assisted rehabilitation, the canals had been lined with cement. Less maintenance is needed nowadays, but all the farmers still meet at the start of the irrigation season to set the rules and responsibilities for keeping the system running. And now that Argali is on a paved road—instead of a several-hour trek on the trail from Tansen—farmers can use tractors or tillers instead of keeping oxen for plowing.
In Andhi Khola, we saw how the ideas from Chherlung of allocating water rights helped to address poverty and inequality. Because water rights were allocated in proportion to people’s contributions in building the irrigation system—instead of in proportion to land holdings—even the landless were able to benefit. Those with large land holdings were required to sell some of their excess land so that the landless were able to trade their labor contributions for land as well as shares of water. During the initial stage of designing the system, farmers from Andhi Khola visited Sukhomajri in India, Argali, and Chherlung to learn from their irrigation systems. This underscored the value of the innovative “farmer-to-farmer” training that Prachanda, Bob, Ed, and others had developed.
The hill irrigation systems of Argali, Chherlung, and Andhi Khola demonstrate the sophistication of farmers in transporting water over long distances, but the Chhatis Mauja/Sorah Mauja system in the terai plains showed that this approach is not limited to small systems in the hills. This system, which uses the Tinau river as its source of water, serves 54 village units (called Mauja) across more than 5,000 hectares. We met with members of the water users’ association in their three-story office building, and surrounded by pictures of their leaders from over the years, heard about how they are keeping the system functioning and their concerns with water pollution.
At the head end of the system, the town of Butwal has grown dramatically, and we saw household drainage water and considerable trash entering the irrigation canals. This pollution is hard to control because many of the people who live in Butwal are not involved in agriculture, so they do not understand or take care of the system.
From Argali we went to Chherlung, which has a fascinating water rights system that dates to the 1930s, when a group of farmers built an irrigation system to bring water three kilometers around a hill to the village. This was not just technically innovative—the way they organized the enterprise was just as creative. Farmers who contributed money and labor to building the system received shares of the water, which they could sell or trade with others. The water rights were separate from the land rights. Wooden “proportioning” weirs divided the canals, so that farmers received water relative to their shares, and could adjust the weirs when they sold or traded water shares. Government-assisted rehabilitation projects have reinforced the canals and replaced many of the wooden weirs with cement, but at least one of the original proportioning weirs was still intact when we visited.
The residents who remembered Bob and Prachanda told us that when the outsiders came to their village, it was assumed that they would bring money, but “instead, they showed us how we could use our own resources.” The irrigation system had enough of a drop to power a small grain mill. Bob designed the mill, and the group obtained a loan from the Agriculture Development Bank, against land from individual farmers as collateral, and with the community of irrigators’ assurance to build it. The mill saved a great deal of women’s labor in processing the rice, wheat, maize, and oilseeds, which was greatly appreciated.
ARGALI
Chherlung
ANDHI KHOLA
Chhatis Mauja
Kalleritar
Our final stop was Kalleritar, where we saw clearly how gender roles in irrigation systems have changed. Forty years ago, men were the decision-makers in the water users’ associations, and they conducted all maintenance on the systems. Government rules now require that women be included in the water users’ associations, but in practice, this is sometimes just nominal participation.
In Kalleritar, an active women’s cooperative has given women the confidence to take on new roles in the organization’s leadership, in communicating between different parts of the system and even participating in the system’s maintenance. A woman leader explained that men and women are working together to find ways to balance women’s contributions to the irrigation system with their farming and household responsibilities.
For those who have read the work of Elinor Ostrom or others on the commons, this self-management may seem obvious. Prachanda Pradhan, Bob Yoder, and Ed Martin were the people who introduced Elinor Ostrom to farmer-managed irrigation systems, and whose work she built on in her seminal book Governing the Commons.
The entire trip showed how communities in Nepal have creatively developed and sustained their farmer-managed irrigation systems. That creativity has enabled these systems to be robust amid changing conditions over the last 40 years. Long-term studies of rural communities are all too rare, but they provide valuable insights such as these.
Conversations with my colleagues on the long car rides reminded me of how important it is to have interdisciplinary studies, with each of us contributing our own expertise, but also being open to learning from each other, and from the men and women in the communities.
Bob’s expertise as an engineer gave me an even greater appreciation of the technical sophistication of these farmer-managed systems. Prachanda shared his understanding of how the water users’ associations worked, what they did to be recognized by the government, and how they modified as well as maintained their own traditions. As a development sociologist, I study collective action and women’s empowerment, which came together in the faces of the women in Kalleritar. The men and women of Nepal’s irrigation systems still have much to teach us all.
