Abstract:
Water is an important component of human life but its availability and distribution is not the same everywhere. The problem of water is becoming acute due to teeming population, intensification in the number of dependents on arable land, disproportionate exploitation of natural water resources and constantly falling ground water level. The crops often face drought in the middle of the season due to low and erratic rainfall and its uneven distribution which ultimately cause adverse impact on the crop production. Farming is very risky due to weather uncertainty. Farmers are completely dependent on surface and ground water for farming and the availability of surface and ground water is decreasing day-by-day. Due to water crisis, farmers are gradually getting away from farming, due to which there is a lot of decrease in productivity. Water crisis can be dealt with only by increasing the productivity of water.Techniques developed by Central Arid Zone Research Institute such as levelling and bunding, contour cultivation, contour vegetative barrier, surface mulching, nadi, tanka, percolation tank, check damlnala (drain) bund, rainwater recharge by gabion, groundwater recharge by recharge wells, khadin, sprinkler and drip irrigation, etc. can be adopted to increase water productivity and effectively mitigate water crisis. In the present paper, a detailed account of all these techniques has been presented for increasing water productivity.
