Impact of Decentralised Rainwater Harvesting Structures on Farm Income, Variable Input Usage and Livestock Possession in Semi-arid Tracts of India: Regression Analyses

Abstract

To sustain the growth of agriculture and feed its growing population, India needs to shift to semi-arid regions characterised by water scarcity for irrigation. Rainwater harvesting is a potential solution to this problem in future. Decentralised rainwater harvesting systems have been developed to overcome the demerits of community based watershed structures. Using robust least square regression it was found that among various factors, adoption of rainwater harvesting structures is significant at 5 percent level of significance and plays important role in not only increasing the farm income but also increasing the use of yield enhancing inputs like fertiliser (1 per cent level of significance), seed (5 per cent), labour (1 per cent) and farmyard manure (1 per cent). Livestock possession was also found to be significantly influenced by adoption at 1 percent level of significance.