Willingness to pay for improved irrigation services in Mahaweli system H

The major features of the water supply and management policies adopted in Sri Lanka have been centralized planning though a public agency, supply augmentation, zero priced or under priced water and reliance on bureaucratic instruments for water supply. Bulk water allocation system has been implemented in Mahaweli system H as a pilot project since 2002 to find out a methodology, which can be used as a complete solution for water management problems in major irrigation schemes. The project provides a legal water right to users, but users have to actively participate and contribute for the sustainable operation and maintenance of secondary and tertiary canal system. The present study is aimed to estimate the value of current level of resource mobilization by farmers and farmers’ willingness to pay for sustainable irrigation system maintenance in order to provide improved irrigation services in the long run. The findings of the study show that the current level of resource mobilization varies from Rs 1450-2275 per/ha/annum (US$15-23) at 2005 prices. Further farmers are willing to pay Rs 599-890 (US$ 6-9) per/ha/year in addition to the current level of resource mobilization to ensure the long-term sustainability of infrastructure and to achieve improved irrigation services. The willingness to pay value is positively related to household income, farm size, location of irrigation canal and type of major crop cultivated. The willingness to pay expressed needs to be considered by policy makers for feasible policy formulations to meet the future cost escalations and to ensure sustainability of irrigation infrastructure

Pilot evaluation of the Index Based Flood Insurance in Bihar, India: Lessons of experiences

The Government of Bihar (GOB) with the help of Government of India (GOI) introduced and implemented various crop insurance programs, to provide protection against losses caused by fluctuations in the output of a crop from one year to another or from one crop season to another. Traditional agricultural insurances are designed to make compensation to client farmers affected by various disasters and natural calamities based on individual yield losses or damage to crops and livestock (Ahmed, 2013; Swain and Patnaik, 2016). For developing countries like India, with large numbers of smallholder farmers, measuring such individual losses would incur enormous costs for insurance companies. The index-based insurance offers an alternative in which individual assessment is not necessary. Advances in satellite technology and data analysis were integrated to develop index insurance products, which were piloted in different countries throughout the world such as India, Ethiopia, Senegal, and United States. The index insurance products help minimize the high transaction costs and have the potential to expand the reach of insurance policies to rural areas that were previously considered uninsurable (Swain and Patnaik, 2016; Smith and Watts, 2019). The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has developed an Index-Based Flood Insurance (IBFI) product integrating hi-tech modeling and satellite imagery (Amarnath and Sikka, 2018; Matheswaran et al. 2019). The product was pilot tested among 200 farmers in six villages of the Gaighat Block of Muzaffarpur District, Bihar during the Khariff season, 2017. This report presents the findings of the IBFI ex-post evaluation undertaken in the pilot areas in Muzaffarpur. The findings of this study provide lessons on how index-based insurance schemes can be made more inclusive, and inform any development of a scheme for future upscaling by IWMI. The findings are based on the qualitative assessment made in April 2018 and a household survey conducted in July 2018

Making index-based flood insurance socially inclusive in Bangladesh: challenges and options

Floods and other weather-related disasters plague farmers in Bangladesh, and climate change threatens to exacerbate these risks. At stake are the livelihoods of millions of small and marginal farmer households that are at risk of becoming further entrenched in poverty. Lack of compensation or other buffering mechanisms means crop losses give rise to deepening cycles of debt, especially when cultivation is financed through loans. While neighboring India has developed strong policy and strategic direction for using risk transfer mechanisms, such as Weather Index Insurance (WII), as a disaster risk reduction tool, policy support in Bangladesh is lukewarm. To date, most WII schemes have been pilots implemented mainly by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and donors. The Index-based Flood Insurance (IBFI) project of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) hopes to adapt the pilot scheme it is trialling in Bihar, India, to Bangladesh. To understand how such a scheme can be made accessible, especially to marginal groups, fieldwork was undertaken in Sirajganj district. Here, a WII pilot project, funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which offers insurance for crops during both the Aman and Boro seasons is ongoing. This brief is informed by findings from this fieldwork

Institutional options available to ensure that index-based flood insurance (IBFI) is socially inclusive in Bihar, India

Flood disaster is one of the greatest challenges affecting the livelihoods of the people of Bihar, India, hampering interventions aimed at addressing poverty, nutrition and health issues. Small and marginal farmers, tenant farmers and female-headed households are the most vulnerable to floods. Past insurance schemes implemented in Bihar, including both conventional and index-based flood insurance (IBFI) schemes, have been largely biased towards larger farmers. As a result, such schemes failed to reach the small and marginal farmers, and other vulnerable groups, despite them being the most in need of risk transfer mechanisms (Singh and Singh 2013). An institutional mapping was followed by interviews conducted with key stakeholders engaged in crop insurance schemes. Based on these interviews, this brief attempts to highlight the existing institutional mechanisms that can support tenant farmers and other vulnerable groups to gain access to IBFI. It also explains how the line agencies of the Government of India (GoI) and the State Government of Bihar (GoB) could use the identified institutional mechanisms to support the future upscaling of IBFI schemes

Ex-Post evaluation of the second pilot of the Index-Based Flood Insurance in Bihar, India: Reflections for upscale

The major objectives of the evaluation were to understand the performance of the IBFI product in reaching diverse groups of farmers and the hindrances to making the insurance more inclusive, in order to recommend solutions and strategies to address equity issues

Virtual regional dialogue on options to promote more inclusive weather index insurance

Over the past decade, countries in South Asia have experienced more frequent and intense extreme weather events – floods and droughts – driven by climate change. In 2021 alone, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal experienced intense monsoon rainfall and floods spurred by an erratic monsoon, even as parts of India and Pakistan experienced intense heatwaves and drought The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report released in August 2021, suggests that such events are only likely to increase, noting that at 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees Celsius global warming levels, mean precipitation and monsoon extremes are projected to intensify in summer over India and South Asia

Climate change and agricultural adaptation in Sri Lanka: a review

Climate change is inevitable and will continue into the next century. Since the agricultural sector in Sri Lanka is one of the most vulnerable to climate change, a thorough understanding of climate transition is critical for formulating effective adaptation strategies. This paper provides an overview of the status of climate change and adaptation in the agricultural sector in Sri Lanka. The review clearly indicates that climate change is taking place in Sri Lanka in terms of rainfall variability and an increase in climate extremes and warming. A number of planned and reactive adaptation responses stemming from policy and farm-level decisions are reported. These adaptation efforts were fragmented and lacked a coherent connection to the national development policies and strategies. Research efforts are needed to develop and identify adaptation approaches and practices that are feasible for smallholder farmers, particularly in the dry zone where paddy and other food crops are predominately cultivated. To achieve the envisaged growth in the agricultural sector, rigorous efforts are necessary to mainstream climate change adaptation into national development policies and ensure that they are implemented at national, regional and local levels

Social linkages of watershed management

Social linkages of watershed managemen