Closed conduit irrigation water distribution system for improving water use efficiency to mitigate water scarcity crisis in 2050

It is needless to explain the importance of water, which is lifeblood for the existence of life on this earth. Water ensures food security, feed livestock, maintain organic life and fulfil domestic and industrial needs. Besides engineering and scientific angle, the present water situation has political, legal, environmental, social, economical and even religious connotations. The increasing gap between demand and availability of water is becoming crucial issue which divides people in to ‘haves’ and ‘have not’ in every nation. Further, to add pressure, apart from geographical demarcations, water divided people from urban and rural, rich and poor. Without efficient water management and optimum utilisation of this essential, scarce and valuable commodity, ecosystem will experience water crisis in future due to increasing water demand verses decreasing per capital water availability. The Climate Change is expected to worsen the situation. India is second largest populated country consists of more than a sixth of the world population with just 2.4% of world's total area and 4% water resources. The national per capita annual availability of water decreased to 1588 m³ in 2010 from 5177 m³ in 1951. It is estimated that in 2050, it will drop down to 1140 m³ as a result of increase in population, which is expected to stabilize around 1640 million. From international perspective, country with per capita availability of water less than 1700 m³ is tagged as water stressed and less than 1000 m³ is water scarce. Thus India is water stressed today and it is likely to be water scarce by 2050. NCIWRD assessed water demand in 2050, for Irrigation, Domestic and Industrial use as 807, 111 and 262 km³ respectively and equals to 1180 km³. The available quantity of water in India will be 829 km3 including 396 km³ from surface water and 433 km³ from ground water. The imbalance between demand and supply can be managed by enhancing supply (supply-side solution) or by curtailing demand (demand-side solution). Nearly 70 to 80% of water is used in irrigation sector, which is currently serving at just 25 to 50% efficiency. The focus of this paper is on curtailing demand for irrigation sector, without compromising with Net Irrigation Requirement (NIR), but by improving water use efficiency. A case study has been chosen to explain the Closed Conduit Irrigation Water Distribution System that was designed for Nagthana-II MI Project, Tal-Warud, Dist-Amravati, Maharashtra. The conventional Canal Distribution Network (CDN) could irrigate Culturable Command Area of 600 Ha with 41% efficiency converted to Closed Conduit Distribution Network (CCDN) to irrigate about 1200 Ha area at 80% efficiency. Implementing gravity based CCDN improves overall water use efficiency to 70 to 80% as against conventional CDN having water use efficiency as 25 to 40%. The other benefits of the CCDN are explained in the paper. In a nutshell, in order to mitigate water crisis in 2050, it is recommended that CCDN must be implemented so that water is utilized optimally and more crop per drop of water can be achieved.