Dated: 3rd October 2025
In the year 2012, the World Bank extended support to the Government of West Bengal for implementing the West Bengal Accelerated Development of Minor Irrigation (WBADMI) project. The goal was to provide assured irrigation by creating minor irrigation infrastructure and organizing the farmers in the command area to form Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) to manage and maintain the irrigation system. The first phase of support, lasted until 2019. The state government continued similar initiatives with its own funds until 2023. All these led to benefit of around 1 lakh farmers through creation of irrigation potential of 67,000 ha of land and 2,837 WUAs were formed. Agriculture Support Services were provided to enhance crop production and diversification with climate resilience. The World Bank has committed another round of support from December 2023 to June 2029 to irrigate more areas and form around 1100 more WUAs. But before moving ahead, both the World Bank and WBADMI recognized the need to pause and reflect—how well have the WUAs performed, and what lessons can be drawn to guide better management of irrigation water, enhancing crop production with climate resilience and enhancing farmers’ income?
To answer these questions, the State Project Management Unit has commissioned the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), now restructured as Tribhuvan Sahkari University (TSU) to take up an evaluation. TSU has, in turn, partnered with SIGMA Foundation to conduct the fieldwork.
The evaluation will have two components. The first one will be to assess the performance of both first phase and second phase WUAs, covering governance of the WUAs, their role in strengthening agriculture and building climate resilience. The study will also come out with some Key Performance Indicators for evaluating performance of the WUAs to strengthen the monitoring system for the project. The second component will be conducting a diagnostic study to understand the causal factors behind poor performance of the WUAs and to know the factors which enable better performance of the WUAs. This study will also serve as a baseline for measuring the project’s long-term impact at the end of the project.
SIGMA Foundation has prepared a mixed method approach and worked out detailed methodology in consultation with IRMA to collect both quantitative and qualitative data to be followed by analyses of the data for evaluating performances of the WUAs and assessing how the project has improved agricultural production and income of the farmers and their level of adoption of climate resilient practices. The field work for the project is to start from the next week and is expected to be completed by the month of December 2025.