Drainage in Irrigated Land
Drainage in Irrigated Land
Drainage in Irrigated Land
The paper includes the entire processes of drainage system in which History of agricultural
drainage systems, Development of drainage materials, Drainage and environmental
sustainability, Modern and beyond modern land drainage, Developments in agricultural water
management are included. And also many innovations in drainage is there like Integrated on-
farm drainage management, Controlled drainage, Bio- and dry drainage, Constructed wetlands
and Drainage bioreactors. The technologies presented here aim at improving productivity, as
well as preserving the quality and sustainability of the environment.
In India, large-scale canal irrigation schemes have been in operation for more than a century.This
paper includes the details of water logging and salinity of various parts of India(11 states) and
the drainage measures, Some recent land reclamation and drainage projects which are Uttar
Pradesh Land Reclamation Project, RAJAD Project- Rajasthan, Haryana Operational Pilot
Project (HOPP), and Mechanized installation of SSD by a private agency in Maharashtra state.
In the agricultural sector, the dwindling number of economically attractive sites for large-scale
irrigation and drainage projects limits the prospects of increasing the gross cultivated area.
Therefore the required increase in agricultural production will necessarily rely largely on the
affordability to apply new technologies, a more accurate estimation of crop water requirements,
and on major improvements in the construction, operation, management and performance of
existing irrigation and drainage systems. The failings of present systems and the inability to
sustainably exploit surface and groundwater resources can be attributed essentially to poor
planning, design, system management and development.This paper includes the details of the
technology,institutional and financial aspects;,research thrust,human resources and networking.
The technology includes the topics planning and design,management, operation and
maintenance, performance assessment,constraints and environmental impacts,
modernization,integrated use of surface and subsurface water resources.
The introduction of irrigated agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions of India has resulted in the
development of the twin problems of waterlogging and soil salinization, as a result of which
considerable areas of canal commands have either gone out of production or experienced
reduced crop yields. It has been estimated that an area of 8.0 million ha is affected by soil
salinity and alkalinity in India, of which about 0.8 million ha of waterlogged saline area is
distributed in the irrigation canal commands in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh in India.
The waterlogging and salinity problems not only cause severe physiological crop damage, but
also increase costs of cultivation, severely affecting the livelihoods of small and marginal
farmers because of reduced income. The ever-increasing need for arable land demands that these
waterlogged saline areas are reclaimed for sustainable agriculture. This paper presents the
experiences in three irrigation projects using subsurface drainage in five pilot areas with soils
varying from sandy loam to heavy clay located in Andhra Pradesh state. The local farmers were
stimulated to share the operational costs of the drainage systems, and actively participate in
monitoring and managing these systems.