This document contains introduction to the Post doctoral research on "Canal Seepage Estimation for Water Logging Applications/Solutions" under the All India Council for Technical Educations, New Delhi, India, Career Award for young teachers scheme by Dr. Rohit Goyal

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 GENERAL

  The Indian economy and development are based mainly on the agriculture, as this is the main occupation of majority of Indians, specially in rural area. Since independence, many efforts have been made to increase the agriculture production, to provide food and fibre for an ever increasing population in our country (India). The estimated population of our country will be 941 millions by the year 1997 AD which is further likely to increase to 1102 millions by 2007 AD. With this population and increase in per capita consumption of food & fibre, associated with growth in income, the food grain requirement for 1997 and 2007 will be about 208 million tonnes and 283 million tonnes respectively. The recent agriculture production was about 182.5 million tonnes(1991-92). Thus without agricultural growth, the country would no longer remain self sufficient for its food grain production, leading to further pressures on our already burdened economy. Therefore, the priorities should be given to the policies which will increase the agriculture production in sustainable manner to fulfil the requirement of food and fibre.

  Land and water are the major resources of agricultural production. As far as land is concerned, the total geographical area of our country is 329 million hectares, out of which 166 million hectares is the arable land. At present the average net sown area is 140.4 million hectares with maximum of 143.21 million hectares in the year 1983-84. However, waterlogging, salinity and alkalinity of soil on account of inadequate planning and inefficient management of water resources projects in conjunction with other adverse physical factors, is likely to severely constrain the growth of net sown area in future.

  Presently, rural and urban settlements, roads, railways, water bodies, mines, defense and industrial installation use about an area of 21 million hectares. An additional area of 4 to 5 million hectares will require for these diverse purposes by 2007 AD. In past the net sown area was increased by converting forest area into the cultivable area, but presently, there is no such scope as forest has been already decreased considerably. The only means available is to reclaim the waste land and land suffering from salinity, alkalinity and waterlogging. With advancement in technology, increasing cost and dwindling resources, we have come to a point where reclaiming the waterlogged area has become a viable and cost effective solution. Accordingly agriculture drainage has now became an integral part of irrigated water management to enhance the productivity in waterlogged and saline land.

  The second resource of agriculture is the water. The water in right quantity, of appropriate quality and applied at right time is a significant input along with seeds, fertilizers and other input for improving agricultural productivity with the limitation of non-availability of agricultural land for lateral expansion as stated above.

  In many regions, the water is a scare resource and quantity of water required for maximum crop production is inadequate. On other hand, in other regions, more water is generally delivered into the soil than that consumed by the crops in evaporation and transpiration. This excess water, unless it can be disposed of by the natural drainage facilities available in tract can accelerate some adverse effect, of which waterlogging and salinity are the most acute and which causes the deterioration in agricultural production per unit area. Also an important contribution to groundwater is in the form of seepage from the irrigation channels, most of which are unlined, from the irrigation waters let on to the fields over and above the quantity actually utilized for sustaining plant growth and on account of obstructions in natural drainage brought about by the new development in the area. It is stated that this contribution to groundwater may be as large as and sometimes even more than the quantity actually utilized by irrigated crops. This new accretion to groundwater may need proper and sometimes artificially introduced drainage for restoring healthy conditions in the soil. Thus the integrated water management is essential to provide suitable moisture environment for the crop to obtained optimum crop yield with the maximum economy. However, proper estimation of such seepage quantities and the likely profile of water table would be required for implementing any such drainage project.

  Over the last decade, many major and minor irrigation schemes have been implemented by the Government of India. These schemes, although giving boost to agriculture production, has also resulted in increasing waterlogged area. It is estimated that in our country, an area of about 2.5 million hectares is suffering from waterlogging and 3.3 million hectares from salinization. Such large area of waterlogged and saline land can be changed in to the suitable land for agriculture, with the suitable agriculture drainage activities in irrigated land.

  Agriculture drainage is defined as the removal and disposal of excess water and salt from agriculture land by some artificial means, to provide a good and healthy environment in the soil for optimal plant growth. The excess water can be precipitation, snow melt, irrigation facilities, over land flow or underground seepage from adjacent area, artesian flow from deep aquifers, flood water or water applied for special purposes such as leaching of salt from the soil or for temperature control etc.

1.2 OBJECT OF STUDY

  These days, the provision of drainage in an irrigation project has become an essential and important factor for optimizing the food production. However, the provision of drainage system in an irrigation system can become costly and unproductive or may be inefficient, if it is not properly implemented after evaluating the field conditions and carefully applying the present knowledge in this area.

  Field engineers would therefore be required to understand the process of seepage from the canals and irrigation channels and evaluate and estimate the water table profile for the actual boundary conditions encountered in the field. Further, for the successful planning, the parameters and governing equations/method of solution to be used for drainage design must be properly analysed, evaluated and applied. Numerical methods of solution such as finite difference and finite elements are becoming increasing popular methods of choice for evaluating the field conditions because of following factors.

  1. With the advancement in computer technology, it is increasing becoming possible to perform large scale calculations, required in these methods, at significantly lower cost and at much faster speed.
  2. These methods can easily adopt to the given boundary geometry, which are normally irregular in shapes.
  3. Assumptions such as homogeneous and isotropic soil media and horizontal layers etc. need not be applied to these methods of solution.

  The drainage equation/numerical method of solution used in designing a drainage system is thus, one of the important parameter which decide the depth and spacing of drainage system.

  In the present work first of all an attempt has been made to estimate seepage and free surface profile from canal to a main drainage, with an intermediate drain. This solution is required from the point of view of analysing the effect of an intermediate drain on the local water table in the long term and thus is likely to shed more insight into the surface and subsurface drainage system. Analytical solution of such a problem is presently not available as per the knowledge of the author.

  Secondly a numerical method such as 2-D/3-D finite difference/finite element would be used to model groundwater flow using field data from the RAJAD project of Chambal Command Area of Rajasthan state. Purpose of such a modeling efforts would be

  1. To understand the process of conceptual design of numerical model which includes design of the grid, selecting time steps for transient models, determining boundary and initial conditions and preliminary selection of values for aquifer and hydrological parameters.
  2. Since, all the required field data is not available and author is not connected with the process of collection of field data and so author cannot judge the accuracy of data collected, so the model need to be calibrated so as to establish that the model can produce field-measured heads and flows. Calibration would be done by trial and error adjustment of parameters. One of the expected benefits of this step would be that the inadequacy of field data, if any, would be exposed.
  3. Such a model then could be utilized to evaluated drain spacing and discharges in other areas of the Chambal Command Area, where subsurface drainage would be required.

The study is based on the data collected for Rangpuria and Digod Test Plot of Chambal Command Area.

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