Subsidies in Watershed Development Projects in India 335Acknowledgements
John Pender, Chris Reij, Roland Bunch, Jules Pretty, David Seckler, Barbara Adolf,
Doug Clark, Tim Kelley and JK Kiara all offered helpful comments on this paper.
Notes
1 This situation is similar to that in Europe, North America and Japan, where subsidies are politi-
cally important and often cause major distortions to the economy. In non-democratic societies,
subsidies are politically important where leaders fear being forcibly removed from office rather
than voted out.
2 Sometimes subsidy and incentive are used synonymously, but not here.
3 Most of the watershed projects referred to in this paper are deliberately left unnamed.
4 Kerr and Sanghi (1992) explain in detail how differences in Indian farmers’ and scientists’ priori-
ties cause them to prefer very different approaches to soil and water conservation.
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