Director of Research,
India has got 17.2 million ha of low-lying area out of 38.0 million ha through out world and 75% of low land rice area is situated in eastern India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand. West Bengal, alone has 4.0 lakh ha of current fallow including the area where nothing could be grown after harvest of pre-kharif crops due to poor drainage, flash flood, occasional flood and submergence. The alluvial zone, itself has got 1.04 lakh ha of such land situation wherein the production of crops was far from satisfactory though the potential productivity of the land is very high. However, a suitable farming system has to be evolved under such situation for effective utilization of water resources and lowland eco-system under multiple use of water. A combination of crop cultivation and animal husbandry including pisciculture has been suggested for such land situation to increase the opportunity of employment as well as to supply protein and fat in the dietary programme. So a combination of fish-rice-vegetable cultivation has been tried in a low-lying risk prone so far unproductive land eco-system to make it productive. Water resource management is an important tool to the researchers to address the issues like climate changes, natural disasters, pollution hazards, environmental degradation, deteriorating soil health for attaining food and livelihood security and mitigating such undesirable situations. In addition to the present status of water availability, rainwater harvesting and its economic utilization coupled with inter basin transfer of water from surplus to deficit basin needs to be executed to maximize full water resources potential. Adoption of proven and cost-effective water management technologies are essential to maximize crop production and minimizing gap between irrigation potential created and utilized. Application of water to minimize conveyance losses; methods and scheduling of irrigation, selection of crop(s) and crop sequence(s) also played an important role for enhancement of water use efficiency. Conservation, distribution and utilization of irrigation water are the basic parameters of on-farm water management. Optimum scheduling of irrigation, choice of suitable method, conjunctive use of rain, surface and ground water for crop cultivation, provision of drainage and use of improved agro-production technology is the basic need of successful on-farm research. Application of proper amount of water at proper time increased the water use efficiency and crop yield and reduced the evaporation and deep percolation losses. The participatory action research is an effective and communicative measure in the developmental processes and involves the users in systemic process of change to make the socio-technical system more viable. On-farm participation encouraged the farmers to adopt irrigation technologies for growing crops on the basis of cost-benefit approach. On-farm water management practices proved to be efficient for dissemination of the location specific technologies to the farmer's field wherein active involvement of the farmers at every stage were ensured. A series of on-farm water management research activities in collaboration with Indian Council of Agricultural Research under the aegis of AICRP on Water Management (BCKV) were conducted in selected deep tube well commands of West Bengal and developed a package of intervention or component technology for different field crops. The results of these studies revealed that there were positive impacts of irrigation water on crop productivity, cropping intensity, input use efficiency, farmers’ income and employment generation on adoption of water management technologies with active participation of the farmers.
