Towards micro-irrigation

If there is one vital natural resource that is becoming more scarce despite being available in abundance, it is water.

The per capita availability of usable water in India has already dwindled to mere one-fifth of what it used to be at the time of Independence and the projections indicate that one-third of the country's population will have to live under absolute water scarcity in another 20 years.

The demand for water is rising rapidly not only in the agriculture sector but also in other sectors, including industry.

The present approach to tackle this problem relies to a great degree on grandiose projects like inter-linking of river basins and other mega projects, most of which require huge investments and offer delayed returns because of their long implementation periods.

A project like inter-linking of rivers may not even take off by the time the problem becomes critical. Besides, its ecological fall-out is still viewed with suspicion.

Under the circumstances, what is needed is a practical strategy to make the available water go far. This can be done by improving the water-use efficiency and curbing its wastage.

In fact, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh had made a move in this direction in his last budget speech by setting up of a task force headed by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu to suggest ways and means to promote relatively more efficient means of micro irrigation, such as drip and sprinkler irrigation systems.

However, it is unfortunate that the report of this task force, presented to the government last month, has not evoked the kind of response that it deserved.

This task force has drawn up a detailed roadmap for promoting micro-irrigation on a large scale.

Besides, it has set a target of bringing at least three million hectares of land under this mode of precision irrigation during the current Plan and 14 million hectares of additional area in the 11th Plan.

Though the expenditure requirement for achieving this target seems huge "" Rs 10,500 crore in the 10th Plan and Rs 51,000 crore in the 11th Plan "" the benefits are indeed even larger.

By the task force's reckoning, this kind of an investment would result in an annual saving of over Rs 66,800 crore by way of direct gain on water saving and indirect gains through reduction in energy consumption and minimisation of fertiliser losses.

Where the costs are concerned, the panel has mooted that these be shared by the Centre, state governments and the actual beneficiaries.

The funds could be sourced partly through the World Bank and partly from the existent corpuses of rural infrastructure development fund, sugarcane development fund and the like.

In any case, even today, crores of rupees are being invested annually on the creation of relatively far less efficient conventional irrigation projects and subsidising the overall irrigation sector directly (by way of low water charges) as well as indirectly (through lower power rates).

Thus, it makes better sense to subsidise micro-irrigation by offering higher fiscal and material benefits than supporting relatively inefficient and ecologically less desirable conventional means of water utilisation.