A controlled supply of water is crucial for much of the world’s agriculture. This is particularly the case in many of the semiarid and unevenrainfall areas of South Asia. While there is a considerable body of work on the management of large canal systems and the structure and practices of the irrigation bureaucracy, economists have only recently started paying attention to issues of local community-level cooperation and other institutional arrangements that are key to substantially improving the existing levels of irrigation usage.

Community institutions have various functions in different irrigation systems. For example, they pool efforts and resources in constructing and maintaining field channels at the local outlet level and at regulating water allocation, and they monitor violations; in cases of tank irrigation they are concerned with desilting, weeding, and stopping encroachments on tank beds; they also are involved in the repair, maintenance, and control of water allocation from public and community tube wells and in controlling groundwater overexploitation by owners of private pumps in areas with fragile aquifers; and so on. Water reform in the sense of building or promoting such community institutions of cooperation is at least as important as land reform in rural development. 1 The history of local community-level cooperation in water management in South Asia is rather mixed. 2 There are several documented examples of successful local community water management (although usually at a rather low level of organizational form) in different parts of the region, some of them going back in history many hundreds of years and still surviving. However, there are also numerous cases of failure of cooperation, which sometimes lead to an anarchical scramble for water. It is important to understand the conditions working for and against sus-