The Relative Economic Benefits of Conjunctive Use of Water over Surface and Ground Water in the Cauvery Command Area

Abstract

In command areas, overutilization of surface water led to deleterious effects, viz. water logging, salinization, alkalinisation of soils results into lower crop productivity and deficit water supply at the tail ends. As consequences, tail end a farmer heavily depends on groundwater will lead to emptying the aquifer and the low-quality water is pumped from deep wells. So, overuse of both the sources of water would leads to imbalance in water management as results into unsustainable water management. Thus, Conjunctive use is a single input to address the physical and economic scarcity of surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) and it offers the solution to a large extent to hurtful effects of SW and GW. The present study was carried out in Mysuru and Mandya of Cauvery command area with 180 farmers of which 60 each from surface water (SW) groundwater (GW) and conjunctive use regime (CU). The results imply that significant difference in productivity level and gross returns for selected crops at 5 per cent significance. The conjunctive irrigation practicing sugarcane farmers realized higher gross returns over GW and SW to the extent of 24 percent and 5 percent respectively. There exists a positive relationship between net return and water use efficiency with correlation coefficient of 0.78 in case of maize and ragi crops. The higher water use efficiency found in CU water for all selected crops.