Irrigation Water Management for Food Security in India: The Forgotten Realities

India’s water crisis is often perceived to have been perpetuated by the widening gap between the utilizable water resources and the aggregate demand for water in agriculture and other sectors in certain regions; and the spatial and temporal variations in water resources endowments. As a result, many scholars argue for technological and policy interventions that aim at increasing agricultural productivity and production in water-rich regions, and export of food grains from those regions to water-scarce regions. In the process, the constraint induced by poor availability of arable land had been by and large ignored leave alone the issue of poor agricultural growth in those regions.