Author: Rajanikanth
P. Rajanikanth a Senior programme officer in a civil society named Centre for World Solidarity shares with us details of a recently formed group called "low cost micro irrigation". People interested to join the group are welcome. The can get in touch at: low-cost-micro-irrigation-systems@googlegroups.com
Centre for World Solidarity (CWS) is a non-governmental public Trust located in Hyderabad. We work with several grass-roots NGOs in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in human empowerment and poverty reduction programs in rural areas.
Recently a project titled 'Community based sustainable groundwater management through social regulations and local governance' is being implemented in Andhra Pradesh by Centre for World Solidarity (CWS) from July 2011 (for more details http://www.cwsy.org/sugwm.html ). The project is being implemented in six gram panchayats in two districts (Warangal and Anantapur) in Andhra Pradesh, India. Jana Jagruthi is one of the NGO partner implementing project in Maddivarigondi (Nallamada mandal) and Masakavankapalli (Gandlapenta mandal) gram panchayats.
As a part of achieving one of the project objectives, it was planned to enhance water-use efficiency in agriculture through micro irrigation and to address the inequalities in access to groundwater by encouraging shared wells. In conventional direct irrigation method of water application, around 40-50% of water applied to crops is lost either in the form of return flow to groundwater or as evaporation to atmosphere. Moreover, a limited hour of electricity supply, in more than one spell, for agricultural pumping is resulting in inadequate irrigation and wastage of water.
Farmers are also facing the difficulty in uniformly wetting the field when the land is undulated. Micro irrigation kits such as sprinklers and drips, save water up to 40% and larger area can be covered within the 7 hours of electricity supply to agriculture in Andhra Pradesh. Also, these kits help to irrigate uniformly throughout the field in most of the crops, horticultural gardens or vegetables in undulated lands also.
The project is targeting the existing or new kinship-based groundwater sharing farmers’ groups, which not only helps in saving 30-40% of water but also helps to strengthen the sharing practice due to enhanced access to water to the farmers in the sharing group. This avoids drilling more individual new wells and helps in sustaining the groundwater irrigation in the project areas.
In this context we divided micro-irrigation activity in farmer applying/received units under government department schemes and experimenting low cost drip systems. In the recent times, we made efforts to convert 500 hectares from flood irrigation to Micro Irrigation through convergence and adding 60% incentive to non-subsidy portion of Andhra Pradesh Agriculture Department schemes such as RKVY and ISOPOM. Currently we are doing some experiments and looking for new ideas which will be benefit to farmer in terms of buying without subsidies and incentives.
With regards.
P. Rajanikanth
Sr. Programme Officer - IEC and Documentation
SuGWM project
Centre for World Solidarity
12-13-451, Street No.1, Tarnaka
Secunderabad-500017
Andhra Pradesh
rajanikanth@cwsy.org / projectsugwm@gmail.com
Mobile: +91 9849575147
Ph/Fax: 91-40-27007906