Elsevier

Agricultural Water Management

Volume 71, Issue 3, 15 February 2005, Pages 257-266
Agricultural Water Management

Economic analysis of water harvesting in a mountainous watershed in India

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2004.09.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Water management is an essential feature of any project related with overall development of agriculture. The Soan river catchment in the northwest Himalayas, is fed only by rainwater. Hence, a strategy of rainfed agriculture needs to be developed through water conservation and storage techniques. The Soan is an important river from a soil erosion and water management point of view and detailed economic analysis is needed for any proposal to be implemented in the field. The present study was undertaken to propose an economic analysis of water harvesting structures for the Soan catchment. The purpose of the investigation is to control erosion and conserve water to meet the requirements of supplemental and pre-sowing irrigation for major cereal crops in the area and to maximise agricultural productivity. Benefit/cost ratios ranging from 0.41 to 1.33 are obtained for water harvesting structures of different sizes with estimated life of 25 and 40 years respectively, by taking into account different crop return from maize and wheat.

Introduction

The goals of rainwater management in an arid region include conserving moisture in the root zone, storing water in the soil profile, and harvesting of excess runoff for supplemental and pre-sowing irrigation of rainfed crops. Because only a portion of the rainwater is stored in the soil profile, the excess runoff water needs to be harvested in farm structures to meet the irrigation requirements of crops and other water needs in the area (Pillai, 1987, Natividad and Wooldridge, 1997). Water management is an essential feature of any project related with overall development of agriculture in arid watersheds. The Soan catchment is fed only by rainwater and hence, there is a need to develop economically viable and socially acceptable strategy of rainfed agriculture by conserving and storing available runoff for the well being of the poor farming community. The Soan, flowing from northwest to southeast and draining the Shivalik range of the Himalayas, is an important river from both soil erosion and water management perspectives. The Soan catchment is located between 75°58′17″E to 76°23′13″E longitude and 31°17′30″N to 31°50′10″N latitude. The catchment covers 1204 km2 and is mostly hilly, with altitude varying from 340 m at Santokhgarh to 980 m above mean sea level at the Chintpurni temple. The soils of the area are formed of soft sandstones, brownish clay, conglomerates and river-derived alluvium that erodes easily. The badly truncated, steeply sloping, hilly terrain on both sides of the river causes rapid runoff into deep precipitous tributaries that drain into the Soan river. The areas under cultivation, forest, and pasture represent 27.8, 18.6 and 4.5% of the area of the watershed, respectively. Wheat and maize are the principal cereal crops and the average yields are 1.04 and 1.48 t ha−1, respectively. The Soan catchment is divided into 32 sub-catchments, as demarcated under the Integrated Watershed Development Project for Rainfed Areas (IWDPRA) undertaken by the Department of Agriculture, Government of Himachal Pradesh, India.

Many researchers (Wiener, 1976, Nawalawala, 1994, Srivastava et al., 2000) have examined water development and water conservation strategies for improving water management in agriculture. In some areas, one application of 5 cm depth of pre-sowing irrigation of wheat increases yield from 2.05 to 3.55 t ha−1 (Singh and Bhushan, 1980, Sastry et al., 1985). Verma (1987) examined supplemental irrigation of maize and wheat, and computed the monetary return and benefit/cost ratio for an entire water harvesting tank irrigation system for Kandi area in district Hoshiarpur of Punjab state. The benefit/cost ratio varied from 1.13 to 4.56 depending upon the type of soil, assuming the life of the tank is 40 years. Other authors have encouraged the formation of water user associations, water pricing, conjunctive use of groundwater with surface supply and integrated watershed management (Anonymous, 2000a). In this paper, we examine site specific soil erosion based planning and analysis for the hilly region of northern India.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

The design capacity of a water harvesting structure normally is determined by the expected value of peak runoff for the anticipated life of the structure. The peak value is determined from historical records. In practice, especially in hills, it may not be possible to harvest all runoff from a catchment due to various reasons. The different reasons are unavailability of suitable sites for reservoirs in adequate quantity, scarcity of roads for carriage of heavy earth moving equipments in the

Results and discussion

The estimated evaporation losses at 4.0 mm day−1 for the period of storage of 119 days (27th–43rd week) are 4371 Ml for the entire catchment. Assuming seepage losses as 20% (6011 Ml) of the volume of water stored the sum of losses is 10,382 Ml for the study area. Thus about one third of the water stored is lost as seepage or evaporation and is not available for later use. Table 1 depicts that the variation in evaporation and seepage loss for various sub-catchments is 68–236 and 94–324 Ml,

Conclusions

The following salient conclusions can be drawn from the present study:

  • 1.

    The total volume of water to be stored and the culturable command area, were determined to be 30,060 Ml and 19,680 ha respectively for the entire Soan catchment.

  • 2.

    Various alternative plans for different sizes (small, medium and large) and life (25 and 40 years) of water harvesting structures have been proposed for the Soan catchment with benefit/cost ratios varying from 0.41 to 1.33.

  • 3.

    Total additional net annual income from the

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