Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
EFFICIENT DEMAND
MANAGEMENT
Agricultural water demand amounts to almost 80% of the total fresh
water demand in our country. In this section we discuss the technical
solution to address this demand. The demand management of industrial
and domestic water is not dealt with in detail here, as it requires
regulatory mechanisms to address it. These will be discussed in Chapter
4 in detail as a part of the implementation framework for revitalizing
rivers. In this section we try to improve agricultural water use efficiency
through appropriate micro-irrigation technologies thus reducing the
demand substantially.
The quantum of water used for irrigation in the last century was
of the order of 300 km 3 of surface water and 128 km 3 of groundwater – a
total of 428 km 3 . The estimates indicate that by the year 2025, the water
requirement for irrigation would be 561 km 3 for a low-demand scenario
and 611 km 3 for a high-demand scenario. These requirements are likely
to further increase to 628 km 3 for low-demand scenarios and 807 km 3 for
high-demand scenarios by 2050. As the world population is increasing
at a very fast rate, to meet the food requirement it becomes essential
to increase the food production at the same rate. To enhance food
production, more land should be brought under cultivation and irrigation
And so efficient use of available water resources is becoming unavoidable.
To tackle this issue, adoption of a micro-irrigation drip system is the best
solution. 48
Drip irrigation is an advanced method of irrigation wherein water
is delivered directly at the root zone of crops at frequent intervals in
a controlled manner through a closed conduit pipe network. In drip
irrigation, generally irrigation is given on a daily basis to fulfil the dayto-day
crop water requirement. As water is conveyed through a network
of pipes and delivered precisely only at the root zone of crops, the
conveyance losses or in-field application losses are almost nil, enabling
overall application efficiency as high as 90-95%. In conventional flood
irrigation, water is allowed to flow through open canals and field channels
and spread in the entire area of irrigation irrespective of cropped and
uncropped areas / root zones. As this is uncontrolled water application
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