India experiences extremes of climate within its 329 million hectares of geographical area. The incidence of rainfall is not only seasonal, occurring mainly during the southwest monsoon (June to September) in most of the regions expect in Tamil Nadu, but also erratic with its onset and withdrawal timing. However, three fourth of its concentration during monsoon months of June to September coupled with long dry periods during the monsoon and absence of perennial irrigation water sources, makes tanks and ponds as an important supplementary sources. To conserve the flood flows during the monsoon rainy seasons and ensure assured irrigation water supplies to undertake irrigated agriculture, enabling to increase food production of water supply for intensive agriculture and for other multiple uses in most regions tanks were created during pre-colonial period. Tanks and ponds are important for monsoon Asia, stretching from India to Japan. This system gradually collapsed due to various destructive factors leads to disuse of tanks and tank irrigated area is reduced to an unforeseen extent. Only in the mid of 1980’s the consequence was realized by government and concept of rehabilitation was materialized. Efforts have been made during the past two decades to rehabilitate irrigation tanks with various objectives. In the initial years (1980s) the focus was to maximise the agriculture production per unit of water supplied to the farmers fields and recently, the emphasis has been shifted towards livelihood approaches through community based tank rehabilitation with involvement of multiple stakeholders. The tank systems have provided insulation from dependence on rains to the people living in the fragile rainfed areas. The farmers in rainfed tanks who are predominantly marginal and small farmers are highly vulnerable to the vagaries of monsoon. The importance of tanks is being realized more and more, as the continued use of groundwater and other water resources is proving to be very costly and inadequate to meet their varying demands. The tank ecosystems have to be conserved to provide a safety net to the livelihood of these farmers. While tanks are usually regarded as primarily for irrigation, there are several characteristic of this type of irrigation that makes it eminent suited for multiple uses.
Taking other productive uses (excluding domestic and livestock) into account, raises the total value of output from tank by approximately 10%, and increase the total revenue mobilized from tanks by more than 200%.The conservation and development of tanks have to be done considering the multiple uses such as irrigation, drinking and domestic water for people and animals, for recharging groundwater; fuel wood and timber, rearing fish, fodder, silt and sand; sanctuary for birds, animals and bio-diversity complex for flora and fauna. The multiple uses of tanks need to be taken into account in evaluating their performance.
Hence this study made an attempt to examine analytically to prove how tank rehabilitation is useful for both direct (farmers) and indirect (landless poor, women and other vulnerable group) tank users. While dealing with the tank rehabilitation, it was decided to study the impact, on the basis of its location. Hence two tanks were selected from two different vicinity, i.e., one in peri-urban area (which is located very nearer to the town) and the other one is located in an absolute rural area. So that tank based agricultural activities, agricultural allied activities and non-agricultural activities is studied in depth.
