Charu Jain

At the 2025 International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meetings, discussions on financing development goals highlight an increasingly pressing reality: the growing economic cost countries incur to achieve financial autonomy. This sovereignty premium is becoming visible across sovereign balance sheets.

Udaibir Das and Hansika Nath 8 October, 2025 Published in: ORF America SUMMARY

India is getting older and faster than most realise. More than 10 percent of our population—over 14 crore people—are already aged 60 years or above. By 2050, this number will double, and for the first time in history, the elderly will outnumber children below 15.

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In a canal-irrigated village in eastern India, farmers increasingly speak not just about yields, but about certainty. “Earlier, we waited for rain,” one cultivator observed. “Now we plan.” That shift—from dependence on rainfall to the ability to plan production—captures a deeper transformation underway in Indian agriculture. As climate change makes monsoons more erratic, dry spells longer and extreme events more frequent, irrigation is no longer merely a tool for boosting agricultural output. It is quietly emerging as a form of climate infrastructure.

India's irrigation story has long been told through large dams and canal networks. For decades, policy has focused on expanding major and medium irrigation projects to create irrigation potential. Yet, much of this discourse has treated large infrastructure and decentralised water systems as separate domains. The real question today is no longer how much we build, but how effectively water reaches farms, interacts with local water systems, and ultimately sustains livelihoods. Recent field-based assessments across irrigation command and adjoining non-command areas point to a more complex reality. While large irrigation projects do create potential, their benefits are unevenly distributed and often extend beyond officially designated command areas. In several project regions, villages outside command areas have also witnessed improvements in cropping intensity, farm incomes, and agricultural productivity. These gains are driven by indirect processes such as groundwater recharge, improved connectivity, and localised spillovers from intensified agriculture.

This study examines women's well-being in Assam, India, through the lens of the Capability Approach to focus on women's substantive freedoms and lived experiences. Drawing on large-scale primary survey data, the paper constructs a multidimensional Women's Capability Index of Assam (WCIA) using the Alkire–Foster methodology at the individual level. The index captures four interrelated capability dimensions: health and hygiene, economic security, social relations, and psychological and emotional well-being, operationalised through eleven indicators reflecting both external conditions and internal freedoms, including dignity, mobility, voice, sleep adequacy, and exposure to violence. The results indicate that 31 per cent of women in Assam experience multidimensional capability deprivation, with deprived women facing substantial intensity of overlapping disadvantages. Decomposition and regression analyses reveal pronounced inequalities by education, work status, household structure, region, and social group, highlighting the vulnerability of unpaid family workers, unemployed women, and those with low education level. The findings underscore that women's capability deprivation is shaped not only by material constraints but also by social norms, power relations, and institutional contexts. By offering a context-sensitive, capability-based measure of women's well-being, the study contributes to empirical capability research in India and provides policy-relevant insights for advancing gender-equitable human development.

The Centre's recent decision to activate contingency plans across 315 districts following a 43 per cent rainfall deficit serves as a stark reminder of India's continuing dependence on the monsoon. Particularly worrying is the identification of 111 districts with irrigation coverage below 25 per cent, making them highly vulnerable to prolonged dry spells and delayed rainfall.