HOUSEHOLD-LEVEL TARGETING UNDER WATER RATIONING POLICY: EVIDENCE FROM AGRICULTURAL PUNJAB

Uniform water rationing remains a dominant policy response to groundwater scarcity in Punjab’s agricultural sector. While administratively simple, such policies overlook substantial heterogeneity in farm structure, crop choice, and realized productivity across households, leading to misallocation and avoidable output losses. This paper develops a household-level matching framework that ranks agricultural households for priority access to irrigation under rationing regimes using a small set of observable characteristics. Drawing on microdata from the 77th Round of the Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households (2019), restricted to Punjab, the study constructs a composite heterogeneity score combining realized crop output, cropping intensity, and land fragmentation. Households are classified into priority tiers that can be directly mapped onto differentiated rationing rules, such as variations in pumping hours. Rather than offering causal identification, the framework provides a transparent, low-cost screening tool that can improve allocative efficiency without increasing total water extraction. The approach highlights how modest reallocation within existing rationing regimes can recover productivity gains while preserving equity objectives.