Beneficiary Participation in Irrigation Water Management: The Kerala

Data requirements
Both primary and secondary data have been used in this exercise. The sources of secondary data
comprise project documents and evaluation reports on BFAs at the international, national, and
State levels including information presented at international and national conferences. For the
State-level data, documents pertaining to functioning of BFAs such as minutes of meetings of
Committees and General Body; internal evaluation reports and annual reports have been used.
Primary data were collected from beneficiary farmers and governing body members and officebearers
of BFAs.
Chapter scheme
The relevant concepts and approaches involved in the study are discussed in Section II. In the
review of literature in Section III, only those sources which are related to the WUAs/farmer
groups are reviewed. While Section IV outlines the formation, structure, beneficiary participation,
and performance of BFAs, Section V contains an analysis of the functions and the organisational
and administrative aspects of these associations. In Section VI, the reasons for the weak
performance of BFAs are examined. Some suggestions for improvement of BFA performance are
also presented in this section. In the final section, the discussion is summarised and the general
conclusion drawn.
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