Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd.
Conjunctive use of water is always preferred from water quality, soil quality and water resources management points of view. However, it is observed that in real practice, it is extremely difficult to plan for the conjunctive use of water for different purposes and is more difficult to keep it in implementation for a long. Particularly in irrigation projects, command areas are designed to bank on the conjunctive use of water not only to overcome limited availability of surface water but also to avoid several problems likely to arise due to irrigation of land. Although conjunctive use is viewed as a necessity to ensure sustainability of irrigation, many difficulties are there on the way to implementing it and sustain it. Failure in implementing the conjunctive use may lead to a great dent up on the performance of any irrigation project and planning of the command area. The roadblocks to implementation of conjunctive use planning are discussed in the paper in order to shed light on the ground realities and the scenario at the planning and implementation stages. Raising issues like quality and quantity of available surface water and groundwater, infrastructural pre-requisites, operation and maintenance requirements, dependability of water and energy sources, suitability for different crops and irrigation methods, relative tariffs of water and electricity, economics of irrigated agriculture, lack of incentives for farmers, social constraints and so on, the paper focuses on the real world problems and attempts to pinpoint why project planning is unable to yield the results envisaged at the planning stage.
