Title: Drip Irrigation and Rainfed Crop Cultivation Nexus: The Case of Cotton Crop
Abstract: The intensification of agriculture along with the increased demand for water from other sectors has put tremendous pressure on the limited water resources in recent years in India. An estimate by the Central Water Commission (CWC) shows that by 2050, the annual requirement of water from all sectors (1447 BCM) would exceed the annual utilisable water from both surface and groundwater sources in India (1122 BCM) (CWC, 2005). While the available fresh water supplies for future use has been declining at a faster rate, the requirement of food and other agricultural commodities has been on the rise because of continuous population growth and feed requirement for livestock (see, Bhalla et al., 1999; Amarasinghe et al., 2007; Chand, 2007). Since irrigation contributes substantially to the gross production of agricultural commodities, the fast increase in demand for irrigation water puts enormous pressure on the policy makers to find out ways and means to improve the production of agricultural commodities while economising irrigation water. The conventional method predominantly followed throughout the world for crop cultivation is flood irrigation. It is considered to be inefficient in terms of field application efficiency and eventually the overall water use efficiency as it allows heavy losses of water through conveyance and distribution (Shreshtha and Gopalakrishnan, 1993; Rosegrant and Meinzen-Dick, 1996; Rosegrant et al., 2002; Postal et al., 2001). Quite a few supply side efforts have been made to increase the water use efficiency under flood irrigation method (FIM) in India and elsewhere in the world. However, those efforts/strategies have not made any significant impact on the overall water use efficiency in both the canal and groundwater irrigated area as of today. Drip irrigation method (DIM) is one of the technical measures introduced about two decades back to increase the water use efficiency in Indian agriculture. Under this method, water is delivered directly to the root zone of the crops using pipe network and emitters. This method is entirely different from the conventional
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 9
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