Free electricity spurs water wastage
What do you produce in your fields?
Mustard and pulses.
Why mustard?
We don't have enough water to produce rice. Mustard takes less water and gives handsome profit in five months.
Is water very valuable in your area?
Look, if a one-litre bottle of water costs Rs 10 while milk in my village sells for Rs 8 a litre, then water is definitely valuable. A few years back, I felt somewhat astounded when people talked about water wars. But now such conflicts are becoming common in our country, since water is getting scarcer by the day. So farmers need to conserve it in their fields.
How does water get wasted in fields?
Farmers just switch on their water pumping motors and leave it running for hours. They keep very little account of how much water is consumed and how much of it is wasted. The reason: the annual electricity charge is fixed. In my village, one has to pay Rs 500 for five-kilowatt (kw) motor and Rs 750 for a seven-kw motor; one need not pay extra money for running the motor for hours. So, lots of groundwater is wasted and eventually the water table plummets. In my village, one could find water at 22 feet some ten tears back, but now I am not sure if we can get it even at 80 feet. I am just back from a tour of Gujarat. After seeing the irrigation technologies there, I have realised that there is another reason for the declining water table in my village.
What's that?
Our farmlands are of uneven height and our present method of irrigation makes the lower tracts get a surfeit of water, while the ones at higher levels go without it. In Gujarat, I saw the fountain system or a drip method of irrigation; here the whole land is watered simultaneously and water is not wasted.
How exactly does this system work?
There is a water tank on a height around ten feet and water is taken to the fields from that tank using pipes. We can fill up this water body by running an engine for two hours only and can irrigate different parts of our fields by drips. That saves both money and electricity.
So, there are new technologies in agriculture today?
Not at all, technology has developed for cars but not agriculture. We still use the same Field Marshal diesel engines that were in vogue 50 years back. The cost of diesel has increased from 50 paise to Rs 25, all this while. But running this engine for two hours still means two litres of diesel consumed