Beneficiary Participation in Irrigation Water Management: The Kerala

25 The two major areas are (i) Tarai, the flat low lands and (ii) Hills. All the major irrigation
projects were Tarai, while small-scale schemes which are indigenous too, dominated in
the hills.
26 Certainly it was the largest in Sri Lanka. It had a total command area of 9.0 lakh acres:
2.46 lakh under the old reservoirs and 6.54 lakh acres under the new project. The
scheme comprised 15 reservoirs. The settlement of the landless was done by distributing
three acres of land per household based on the principle of the cluster system of settlement.
27 For example, irrigation and drainage systems at the farm level were designed to supplement
water supply to rice in wet season; information/guidance given by officials was inadequate.
Above all, there existed no co-ordination of activities taken up by several departments for
achieving agricultural development and for providing assistance to farmers.
28 The Royal Irrigation Department (RID) had a water operation centre which allocated
water among the projects. The centre assisted project engineers to distribute water at the
main canal level, who in turn, gave it to the water master’s section (a sub-unit of command
area). The water master instructed the zone man on the supply schedule to be followed
for the check regulators and on the off takes to be applied.
29 Public sector irrigation projects were (i) The National Irrigation Board for large schemes,
set up in 1966, which were settlement schemes, and (ii) The small-scale irrigation
programme set up in 1977 with small holder participation. Most of the common smallscale
irrigation systems were small canal systems into which water used to be diverted
from rivers either by gravity or by pumping. The private sector irrigation projects
concentrated on plantation crops like, coffee, fruits, and pineapple, which were major
export items.
30 In marked contrast to irrigation practices in many Third World countries, Egypt used the
tensiometer to decide when to irrigate, after measuring the tension in the pore space of
the root system. Also underground pipes were used for some distributory canals to
prevent large-scale seepage through the sandly soil. These were to operative as a low
pressure system and water-lifting was not required.
31 This has reference to common problems like over-irrigation in upper reaches and the
consequent shortage of water in the tail-end areas, disputes over water distribution,
tampering with the canal system and the irrigation structures like sluices and turnouts.
Over-irrigation resulted in the raising of the water table and the consequent leaching
of nutrients, poor aeration at the root zone and low yield.
32 It was 100 kg of rice/ha for the wet season and 150 kg of rice for the dry season in
the run-of-the-river gravity system. With storage reservoirs, it was 25kg/ha or more.
In pumping systems the rates were still higher than in reservoir projects; these rates
were decided on a case-by-case basis. The level of water fee thus depended on the
level of certainty of supplying water.
33 Historically CIS were in existence even prior to the Spanish colonisation of the
Philippines. Both during and after the Spanish rule, 3,00,000 hectares were reported
to be covered by CIS; most of them had simple, temporary low dams of logs, stone,
and bush built across mountain streams to divert water to paddy fields below through
earthen canals.
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