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Application of Econometic Methods for Assessing the Impact of Watershed Programs

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/3561/
 
Title Application of Econometic Methods for Assessing the Impact of Watershed Programs
 
Creator Palanisami, K
Kumar, D S
Wani, S P
 
Subject Watershed management
 
Description Watershed programs in India are contributing to water resources
development, agricultural production and ecological balance. Impact
assessment of watershed development project includes:(i) developing
a framework to identify what impacts to assess and (ii) developing
a framework to look after the indicators together and assessing the
overall impact of the project. The nature of watershed technologies
and their impact on different sectors pose challenges to the evaluation
process. More specifically, major challenges include (i) choice of
methodologies,(ii) selection of indicators,(iii) choice of discount rate,
(iv) quantifying benefits in upstream and downstream,(v) defining
the zone of influence, and (vi) extent of natural and artificial recharge
conventional methods using financial measures attempt to quantify
the impacts in an isolated manner. In order to evaluate the impacts
of watershed programs in a holistic manner, the Economic Surplus
(ES) approach has been applied. The economic surplus incorporates
both consumer surplus and producer surplus. The consumer surplus
is the amount that consumers benefit by being able to purchase a
product for a price that is less than they would be willing to pay. The
producer surplus is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a
market price mechanism that is higher than they would be willing to
sell for. In the case of watershed programs, producers are mainly the
farm households who produce the goods using the benefits of the
watershed interventions such as soil and moisture conservation, water
table increase and livestock improvement activities and consumers are
mainly the other stakeholders in the region, viz. non-farm households
representing the labourers, business people and people employed
in non-agricultural activities. The ES method is demonstrated using
the data from a cluster of 10 watersheds in the Coimbatore district
of Tamil Nadu. The distributional effects of watershed programs are
also captured through the ES method. The results of the conventional
method had indicated that the BCR is 1.23, IRR is 14% and NPV is Rs
567912. The results of the ES method had indicated that the BCR is
1.93, the IRR is 25% and the NPV is Rs 2271021. The conventional
evaluation method had thus underestimated the watershed impacts.
Hence, possibilities of using the ES methodology in the future
watershed evaluation programs could be examined
 
Date 2011
 
Type Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Rights —
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/3561/1/Application_of_econometic_methods_for_assessing_the_impact_of_watershed_programs.pdf
Palanisami, K and Kumar, D S and Wani, S P (2011) Application of Econometic Methods for Assessing the Impact of Watershed Programs. In: Use of High Science Tools in Integrated Watershed Management Proceedings of the National Symposium, 1–2 February 2010, NASC Complex, New Delhi, India.