In recent time, the proper utilization and management of available water resources are of top priority. It is a well known fact that water quantity is a limited resource to undertake new irrigation projects in most of the regions in India, which makes it imperative to improve the performance of the existing projects for the economic growth of the region. It is a fact that a large population of Odisha state of India depend on agriculture. Hirakud dam over Mahanadi River in Odisha, India which was built in the early days of Independence having live storage capacity of 5375 M Cum. The Hirakud command area is served by three canal systems namely Sambalpur distributory, Bargarh main canal Sasan main canal. The study area is called food bowl of the state of Odisha, India. The use of CROPWAT software is shown in the study to find out the crops water requirements of different crops and linear programming software (LINDO) which has helped in finding different crop details and finally the crop pattern. This study also highlights the needs of the local farmers and also recommends the ways which will help the farmers for better cultivation and to earn an overall annual income much more than what they earn today. The finding of the study reveals that by adopting the cropping pattern proposed by this current study the farmers can get an extra benefit of 30.02% for the Kharif and 30.26% for the Rabi crops over the existing pattern.
Bench marking, cropwat, Optimization with Linear Optization Model using lindo
