Water Resources Department, Government of Maharashtra, India
Online published on 12 January, 2016.
Water, which is a vital valuable, finite, renewable and shared resource demanded by several sectors, should be managed optimally. The stress due to unavailability or limited availability of water is growing at alarming rate. To cater this, construction of new water resources projects, improving water use efficiency of existing projects, use of advanced technology for water application and recycling of water are some of the solutions.
Focusing on irrigation sector of India, particularly after independence, more than half of all public expenditures on agriculture have been spent on irrigation alone. As a result, land area under irrigation expanded from 22.6 Mha in 1950 to 123 Mha in 2007, which is about 544% increase in four decades. But, this increase was about 88% of the estimated potential. To irrigate remaining 12% land, and to fulfil all demands by several developmental sectors simultaneously, new water resources projects may be planned. But this involves huge investments in construction and maintenance of projects, issues of water availability and social problems associated with land acquisition and rehabilitation. Therefore, there is an urgent need to search innovative alternatives to efficiently use the water stored in existing reservoirs.
Irrigation sector is the biggest consumer of water as more than 80% of available water resources in India are being presently utilized for irrigation purpose, serving at just 25 to 40% water use efficiency. Thus, there is large scope for improving efficiency in this sector to avoid loss of 60 to 75% water.
The objective of this paper is to emphasis on the use of Pipe Distribution Network (PDN) instead of Canal Distribution Network (CDN) in command area of irrigation project to improve efficiency of water use. By virtue of PDN the water use efficiency can be improved to 70 to 80% from existing efficiency of 25 to 40%. Thus there is about two to three times increase in the water use efficiency for irrigation, which means that there will be 55 to 65% improvement in overall water use efficiency as irrigation itself is 80% shareholder in water use. In other words, from the same reservoir, double the command areas could be irrigated, or additional equal volume of water is made available which can be distributed to another purposes. To backup above statements, this paper is based on the design of PDN of Nagthana-2 Minor Irrigation (MI) project, located at Amravati district of Maharashtra state, which was initially designed to irrigate Culturable Command Area (CCA) of 600 Ha by conventional CDN, and now planned for gravity PDN and result implies that same volume of water could irrigate CCA of 1200.
In this paper, focus is placed on the use of PDN instead of CDN in command area of irrigation project to improve efficiency of water use. By virtue of PDN the water use efficiency can be improved to 70 to 80% from existing efficiency of 25 to 40%.
