Case study of Water Saving Through Temporary Water Storage Ponds in Village Vadavathur in Namakkal District

Vadavathur in Namakkal District is a drought prone village. The annual rainfalls is 400 mm. Farmers pump water from open and bore wells and store it in unlined temporary water storage pond and then irrigate the grown crops. Under the NICRA scheme fourteen temporary storage ponds were lined with HDPE 200 GSM UV irradiated plastic sheets. Most of the farm ponds were of the size of 65 ft length, 45 ft breadth and 6 ft depth with water holding capacity of 17,550 cu.ft. When water was stored in plastic sheet lined ponds, the seepage loss was minimized to ½ ft only in 15 d compared to ½ ft of water loss within 3 days in unlined storage ponds. Ground nut pod yield (22 q/ha) increased by 18 per cent as compared to 18q/ha obtained from fields irrigated from unlined ponds. The increase in yield was due to increased frequency of irrigation once in 10 d in lined pond compared to once in 15 d in unlined ponds. Similarly the weight of onion bulb was 23–25 g in field irrigated with the lined ponds compared to 9–11 g from fields of unlined ponds. This intervention helped in saving water as well as increasing the yield of crops.