Prof Researching Water Depletion

Dr. Shailendra Gajanan, associate professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, is spending two months this summer studying water depletion in India with the hopes of making a recommendation to the government there. Gajanan has returned to his native Chennai (formerly Madras) for the months of July and August to work with two colleagues on the project, which will look for patterns and characteristics of the depletion and determine what measurements are most useful in crafting a solution.

The project, “Strategic Democracy and Water Depletion: A Case-Study from Tamil Nadu Farmers,” will also be published later this year as a chapter in a book, “Welfare Economics,” edited by Paul E. Weston and Robert N. Townsend.

Gajanan explains an economic theory that, if left to their own devices, people in a democracy will use up all of their resources. The government, he says, is supposed to regulate common resources and protect the masses from their own appetites.

“At the local level, however, politicians are people, too,” Gajanan says. “They are also motivated by market forces.”

He uses the example of the Tamil Nadu farmers to illustrate his theory.

In order to win elections and stay in office, local elected officials in Tamil Nadu gave farmers free electricity. The result was that farmers installed powerful pumps and used unlimited quantities of water, depleting the region’s water table.

“Who are the farmers who benefit by this scheme?” Gajanan asks. “And I want to find out about the quality of water and level of depletion and hope to propose remedies to the government.

“Researching water issues is a very important thing from an economic standpoint.” He adds that water disputes are a constant concern in India, where water is scarce and each individual state has the right to govern its own water. That leads to plenty in some states, and severe shortages in others.

While in India conducting research, Gajanan will also make several presentations to Indian students. He will be lecturing to university students on the state of the U.S. economy, which is always a hot topic in India, he says, because “if the United States catches a cold, India gets pneumonia.”

Gajanan will also work with younger students, teaching them about market forces through games.

Gajanan has been teaching at Pitt-Bradford since 1992. His research interests include applied microeconomics, labor economics and game theory. He has also led a study on the economic impact of Pitt-Bradford on the local economy. He lives in Bradford with his wife, Rekha, an instructor of composition at Pitt-Bradford, and their two children.