Reasons of low water use efficiency in irrigation Projects in India.
Published on by Yogesh Agrawal, Director (retired), Minor irrigation schemes, Water Resources Department at Govt of Rajasthan in Technology
Low water use efficiency in irrigation projects in India, is due to non consideration of head loss across different canal structures in canal design and non inclusion of construction of water courses as part of the Project report. I submitted a draft IS code in WRD 13 for " Design and Construction of Water Courses " more than ten years ago, but it has not been finalized and sent for printing by the Bureau of Indian Standard.
In July 2003, in WRD 13, I also submitted a draft code titled " Guidelines for Adopting Coefficient of Friction (Rugosity Coefficient) for Design of Canals" ( see as attachment). This is available at https://drive.google.com/?tab=mo&authuser=0#folders/0B7OEEuzHbopKU2VKaG1Oc1ozQUU
In agenda of tenth meeting of WRD 13 the comments of SSNNL, CES, CDO Nasik, NHPC Ltd, CWC & WALMI were discussed. But later on this draft code was dropped by the committee. The ponding level of Kota Barrage was raised by two feet in seventies, as there was head loss in initial portion of Right Main Canal supplying water to Madhya Pradesh and RMC was not able to run with design discharge. A copI invite comments of peers on these two points.
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3 Answers
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Arvind Sir and Navaraj Sir, Thank you for sharing this idea.As I am trying to find the benefit of lining canal over a distance of 2 km, this will be helpful for me.
1 Comment
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Hi Swetalina, I just can advise you as per my experience that the lining is useful if the seepage losses are high or the soil through which canal passes is a problematic soil. You may like to observe seepage losses in canal by ponding method.
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Not only Canal design, there are many other factors too e.g. water application pattern to field, unnecessary pondage of fields by farmers, lack of rehabilitation of old canals etc. are responsible for Low Irrigation efficiency.
1 Comment
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Hi Arvind. You are right. There are so many factors. I just want to stress that the Central Water Commission must revise the whole process of concept, planning, design , construction and maintenance of the canals. CWC is so ignorant and engaged in self praise, that it does not want to read the message written on the wall. When most of the canal systems in India have similar problems of canal water not reaching the tails of canals , seepage and water logging and low water efficiency of about 40 top 50 percent as against 90 percent of Australia, then why Central Water Commission does not want to give attention to this problem. Is anybody in CWC is there to answer why the "WRD 13(378) Draft IS for adopting coefficient of friction" was dropped by CWC in the meeting of WRD 13 ? I am going to write to the Prime Minister and Minister for Water Resources Department, Government of India. If both of them write to CWC, I hope the Central Water Commission may like to obey them.
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Canal is not properly constructed to avoid the loss of water reaching the irrigation point. Damaged , Evaporated or Leaked canals should be checked and corrected properly. This Supervisory mechanism is totally missing in the implementation level. Once the project is over, the officials are now forgetting the project and if any followup is needed then they would say that there is no funding to carry out this. To get the approval of above mentioned works, they have to wait for months. This is the pathetic situation .