Problem overview:

     Stakeholders participation: Government agents and farmers work cooperatively on managing water resources and farming produce especially during tough times when water resources is scarce.

     Meeting information requirements: In times of drought, an efficient water resource allocation scheme is required for fairness and coverage in allocating the resource to farmers. In some cases, techniques for resource allocation need not be sophisticated and costly. Traditional methods work well for the farmers in the dry zone area of Sri Lanka.

Background:

      Efficient resource allocation by traditional techniques

      The earliest inhabitants of Sri Lanka settled in the dry zone close to the rivers. They built large reservoirs to store the water and to irrigate the rice fields. These reservoirs some of which date back to 432 BC, continue to irrigate a large percentage of the rice fields and contribute to the food production effort even today. Although most of the ancient engineering technologies are lost to us, some of the water management techniques still prevail. While there are Irrigation Engineers to control the storage and distribution of water; allocation and management of water is controlled with the assistance of Water Management Committees comprising of the rice farmers.

      Under the Irrigation Ordinance of Sri Lanka, the Government Agent who is the Administrative Head of District Public Service is empowered to hold Kanna or Water Management Meetings prior to each season. Since Sri Lanka has two major rice farming seasons, namely Yala and Maha commencing with the Southwest Monsoon and Northeast Monsoon respectively, two such meetings are convened by the Government Agent every year. The views of the farmers are expressed openly with regard to the type of crop to be grown during the season, whether it is short term rice variety of long term rice variety and the timing of the first release of water and the final release of water. Farmers take these decisions taking into account the extent of water in the main reservoir, and the probability of further rains as the season proceeds.

      More innovative is the traditional system of water management and farming in the event of drought and the reservoir not holding enough water to cultivate the full-irrigated extent under the reservoir. The farmers recognize that given the small quantity of water in the reservoir, if water is released to the fields in the tail end of the channels, there could be heavy losses due to evaporation and seepage. Hence the farming community decides to temporarily ignore the boundaries of the farms owned by them individually and jointly cultivate the extent close to the irrigation outlet. Each farmer will cultivate an extent in proportion to the extent owned by him or her in larger tract of rice field. This form of cooperative farming known as Bethma greatly facilitates the cultivation of the optimum acreage.

      Equally interesting is the system called Tattumaru adopted by farmers when the fragmentation of land makes it uneconomical to cultivate in small units. When a farmer has a very small unit, he opts to forego the cultivation of his unit giving the opportunity to another to cultivate a larger unit including his. This makes the operational unit more viable. Each farmer gets his turn, but not every season.