Farm pond: need of the hour for sustainable agriculture

The agricultural sector employs nearly half of the workforce in India. However, its contribution to the GDP has been declining steadily in recent years from from 18.2 percent in 2014-15 to 16.5 percent in 2019-20 according to the Economic Survey 2019-20. As high as 61 percent of the farmers practice rainfed farming with 55 percent of the crop area in India being rain dependent, while the rest is irrigated using tubewells, canals, wells, tanks, and other sources. Fifty percent of agriculture depends on groundwater in India with 39 million hectares of land irrigated by groundwater, 22 million by canals with about 100 million hectares being rainfed. Agriculture consumes around 80 percent of India’s available water and 90 percent of the total production includes water-guzzling varieties like sugarcane, wheat, and rice. This inefficient use of water has led to a dip in India’s per capita water availability from 4000 m3 in 1947 to 1545 m3 in 2015 making India a water stressed country. Farm Pond is one such program initiated. The Farm Pond program has triggered a grassroots‐level movement for sustainable agriculture. It helps farmers engage in sustainable agricultural practices involving rainwater conservation and harvesting. Although the farm pond technology is well known in the country, its adoption has been quite low due to number of constraints like high initial cost, short life of the lining materials, lack of suitable lifting systems and above all low awareness among farmers about its utility and cost benefit analysis. There is also lack of authentic literature on the design and performance of farm ponds in different agro ecological zones and soil types. Several programs of the Government of India like RADP (Rainfed Area Development Program), NHM, MGNREGS and IWMP have farm pond as one of the important components. The field staff involved in the implementation of such schemes often face difficulties in designing these structures at a given site considering the rainfall, slope and soil characteristics.