Book of Extended summaries ISDA

International Conference on Reimagining Rainfed Agro-ecosystems: Challenges &
Opportunities during 22-24, December 2022 at ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad
harvesting enables to increase the cropping intensity substantially and thus increase farm
income. The average productivity of 1.0 t/ha of dryland agriculture could be doubled easily by
providing 1 or 2 irrigation. The major impediments in realizing the potential of water
harvesting and recycling in dryland agriculture is however, the economical and effective means
to lift water and distribute the same at the field. The existing means of lifting pumps is grossly
mismatched because its turns to be over designed in view of small size water harvesting ponds
(usually of capacity up to 1000 m 3 ). Moreover, the lifting pump depends upon the supply of
either electricity or fossil fuels. Thus, the affordability of this means to the small and marginal
farmers is a major concern. To avoid the economic liabilities associated with lifting pump and
increase the profitability from limited land and climate resources, this class of farmers usually
goes for hand watering of crop by fetching water as head load. This consumes lot of time along
with physical labour. The present innovation is proved as the economical and efficient
alternative to the water lifting and high-pressure requiring irrigation system. The present
innovation is a perfect match between the water available and area under command can be
extensively used for small scale vegetable production that improve quality of life by means of
providing food and nutritional security along with income generation.
Issues associated to current water utilization techniques
The wastage occurring through storage, conveyance and distribution ultimately result in
delivery of 30 to 35 % of stored water for plant uptake (Patil 1988). The traditional flood or
ridge and furrow method of irrigating field suffers from numerous problems such as
considerable seepage (Moolman 1985, Hodgson et al 1990, Kahlown and Kemper 2004),
conveyance and evaporation loss (Singh et al 2006); higher energy cost; lower water
productivity; irrigation-induced soil erosion (Gomez et al 2004), and leaching of costly
agricultural inputs causing sub-surface water pollution (Humphreys et al 1989). Moreover, this
method is supply driven rather than crop-demand driven causing mismatch between need of
the crop and the quantity of water supplied. The decrease in the availability of water for
agriculture, coupled with the requirement for the higher agricultural productivity, means that
there is no option but to improve the water use efficiency. This has to include an efficient
utilization of available water which otherwise would evaporate or percolate from the root zone
of the soil.
The recent advances in irrigation technology have made inroads in the cultivation of vegetables
and horticultural crops. The frontier technology of micro-irrigation system not only provides
higher water productivity but also minimize the problems associated with the traditional
irrigation system. However, these irrigation systems work best with ground water and so its
expansion concerns a lot. So there is a need to address the issue of suitable irrigation system
for pond water. The issues are
138 | Page Resilience through land and water management interventions, water management and governance