Centre to speed up 99 irrigation projects, says senior official

Coimbatore: The Centre has taken up 99 long-pending medium and major irrigation projects across the country and would complete them by December 2020, chief executive officer of the National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA) Ashok Dalwai said here on Monday.
The ministry of water resources has allotted a corpus fund for the projects, he told reporters on the sidelines of the foundation day ceremony of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. “After these projects are completed, 7.6 million hectares more would be added to the irrigated area in the country,” he said.
The Centre has also increased the target under its micro irrigation scheme so that a total of 1.3million hectare per annum would be benefited compared to 7lakah hectares earlier. “The NRAA has suggested policy changes to double the income of farmers and the redesigning work has already begun. One example is the fixing of the minimum support price (MSP) in 2018. This benefited millet farmers more than others. Also, the new procurement policy, Pradhan Mantri Annadata Aay Sanrakshan Abhiyan (PM-AASHA), lays focus on pulses, millets and oil seeds, all of which come under rainfed irrigation,” Dalwai said.
Earlier, addressing the event, the official said 85% of the country’s usable water was being consumed by agriculture. “We should develop technology that would help us use water for agriculture more efficiently. We earn $0.5 for every litre of water we use. Whereas, China earns $1.6 and Israel $3.9. The country should look to fuse economy and ecology in an optimal way. Agriculture should be looked upon as an enterprise built upon profits.”
The Green Revolution had been ‘non-secular’ in the sense that it focussed only on certain crops and certain regions, Dalwai said. “It has also extracted the once abundant potassium from our soils and has left a lot of problematic soils. Now it is time that new scientists come up to make agricultural practices more profitable and efficient,” he added.