In other words, the irrigation effect on rice is relatively greater, meaning that rice is a crop requiring intensive irrigation. Therefore, the Green Revolution started with introducing high-yielding wheat, and it was applied later to rice that require more water management.
To enable good water management on a certain scale of farmland, canal irrigation and tube wells are effective methods. For canal irrigation to function properly, a water users association necessary is, managing allocation of water and collecting water charges. However, maintenance and management of canal irrigation involves a number of outstanding problems and not in India alone. In reality, water charges collected cannot even reach 50% of the requirement. Furthermore, construction of canals requires a great deal of public investment, and this issue is at deadlock in an India that suffers from a budget deficit, as will be mentioned later. For these reasons, tube wells, that enable efficient water management, are essential for the introduction of high-yielding varieties especially of rice. In recent years, increases in land productivity have been observed in poor provinces such as West Bengal around the lower-reaches of the Ganges, and Bihar. This is because tube wells have been constructed.
Also essential for efficient irrigation are land consolidation of farmlands. One of the bottlenecks of Indian farming is the fragmentation of land holdings. This is the obstacle against construction of tube wells with some economy of scale, and impedes efficient use of water resources by making operation and management of canals difficult. The necessity of land consolidation has been pointed out since before independence, and some efforts began to be made in the old Punjab including Haryana in the British colonial era. This movement expanded to a full-scale project, which had been completed by the 1960s in Punjab and Haryana, so that these states were ready to meet the system requirements of the Green Revolution.1 In Bihar and West Bengal, however, land consolidation has hardly made any progress.
