Labour Decomposition Analysis under Different Soil and Land Irrigability Environments in the Kakrapar Left Bank Canal Irrigation Project in Gujarat State

Abstract

An attempt has been made to decompose the change in labour demand between irrigation classes and between soil degradation levels into technological component and complementary input components. The employment decomposition model was employed. Two stage random sampling technique was used to select the farm households. At the first stage, 18 villages were randomly selected from , the Kakrapar Left Bank Canal (KLBC) command in a way that it represented all the irrigability classes. The KLBC is having only II, III and IV classes of land irrigability. Ten farmers who had benefited from the canal water were randomly selected from each of the selected villages. Finally, the selected farmers were stratified according to soil degradation perceived by them. The Cobb-Douglass production was fitted to establish the relationships with land irrigabiJity classes and soil degradation, which revealed that land irrigability class and soil degradation levels had negative relationship with yield of the crops. The use of other inputs had positive effects on yield. The results revealed that magnitude of change in labour demands depends upon the change in irrigation classes and soil degradation levels. The complementary inputs like family labour and fertilizers used had a direct positive effect.