CO AUTHORS
Shailesh Nagar, Partner-NRM, Intellecap & Dr Sangita Ladha, Consultant, Intellecap
A few years ago, while travelling through the Chandrabhaga valley in Himachal Pradesh’s remote Pangi landscape, I found myself puzzled by an obvious absence. Here was a steep, powerful gorge — the kind of terrain that, almost anywhere else, would have attracted hydropower infrastructure. Yet there was none. When I asked people in Killad, the valley headquarters, why no project had moved forward, their answer was simple: tenders had been awarded, but no private developer could begin work because the road itself could not support the movement of equipment. Until that public investment was made, the private investment, could not follow.
That moment stayed with me because it illustrates a larger truth about development: economic activity does not begin with enterprise alone. It rests on foundations — roads, bridges, digital connectivity, and, just as critically, natural resources such as water and soil. Some of these foundations are created over millions of years by nature; others depend on deliberate public investment. But unless they are built, maintained and governed collectively by public, private and community actors, the economic structures placed on top of them eventually become fragile.
Sugarcane covers about 3.1% of India’s cropped area, and paddy and sugarcane together absorb roughly 70% of the country’s irrigation water. This is the reason why the sugarcane (along with rice) has remained a focus for any serious conversation on water security in India. In the Krishna and Bhima basins of western Maharashtra — two long, V-shaped valleys running from Pune toward the Karnataka border — this tension plays out on the ground every season. Groundwater is perennial only in the central valley; the uplands on either side are seasonal and drying, and studies of the Upper Bhima basin project further groundwater decline in the range of six metres as sugarcane-driven pumping continues.
Curiously, the same landscape also floods: farmers in the valley’s black clay soils battle waterlogging after heavy monsoon spells, sometimes losing crops to root rot within ten days. Scarcity and excess, in other words, are two symptoms of the same unmanaged system.
A recent Sankalp dialogue convened by Intellecap brought together an offtaker, a water-research institution, an irrigation technology company, a bilateral development agency and a philanthropic funder to examine why — despite decades of investment — this system remains so hard to fix. In this blog article, I will try to unpack that conversation, as it highlights a pattern that recurs well beyond sugarcane. And this pattern is that India does not have a shortage of capital or technology for natural resource management. It has a shortage of convening.
The capital may not be the key issue
India’s agriculture sector is worth roughly $600 billion and accounts for 16–18% of GDP.
Public capital aimed at water and soil already flows through multiple schemes such as Atal Bhujal Yojana, which alone has a Rs 6,000-crore outlay, jointly funded with the World Bank, and has been implemented across 8,562 gram panchayats in 80 districts of seven states, including Maharashtra.
On top of that the micro-irrigation subsidy architecture, natural farming missions, MGNREGA-turned-VB-GRAMG labour budgets for water-harvesting structures, and corporate CSR create a condition where capital is abundant.
Yet convergence between these flows is rare. Government programmes are designed around institutional mandates of a ministry, department or a scheme, each with its own reporting line. An integrated landscape thinking is not integrated in any of them.
The result is duplication (multiple actors building water-harvesting assets in the same micro-watershed) and mistiming (labour-budget funds for conservation structures arriving after, rather than before, the monsoon they were meant to prepare for). The gap is coordination and governance, not capital.
