While the impact of groundwater irrigation on the productivity of crops and other parameters has been well-documented in India, not many studies are available highlighting its role in the value of agricultural output using district-level data. This paper attempts to find out the impact of groundwater irrigation on VAO using cross-sectional data for 189 Indian districts covering three time points: 1990–93, 2003–06, and 2017–20. Both descriptive and regression analyses have been used in this paper. The descriptive analysis shows that VAO per hectare is significantly higher for those districts having a high level of groundwater coverage (>50%) than the districts having less (<30%) groundwater irrigation. The multivariate regression analysis carried out by using yield augmenting and infrastructure variables shows that the role of groundwater irrigation in impacting VAO has significantly and consistently increased over time.
