Summary Water Charging in Irrigated Agriculture Lessons from the Field

Department for International Development. It complements an earlier report, “Water Charging in Irrigated Agriculture: Lessons from the literature”. Together these reports present a state-of-knowledge review of the role of irrigation water pricing, either as a means of achieving financial sustainability through cost recovery, or as a tool to bring about water savings, and potentially the reallocation of water ‘savings ’ to higher value uses. Case studies are presented from the following locations: • Two areas of India – Haryana, a relatively prosperous state with a long history of publicly managed surface irrigation, and northern Gujarat, where private exploitation of deep aquifers has been developing rapidly over the past 20 years. • Sindh province in Pakistan, where the underlying legislation and infrastructure are identical to Haryana, but the institutional environment differs. • Six government schemes in Nepal – five surface and one groundwater-based