ABSTRACT
M. U. KALE, S. B. WADATKAR, M. M. DESHMUKH, D. B. PALWE, and A. S. TALOKAR
9.1 Introduction .................................................................................. 305 9.2 Materials and methods ................................................................. 306 9.3 Results and Discussion .................................................................311 9.4 Conclusions .................................................................................. 314 9.5 Summary ...................................................................................... 314 Keywords .............................................................................................. 316 References ............................................................................................. 316
9.1 INTRODUCTION
Water is a precious natural resource, a basic human need and prime national asset. India will be a highly water stressed country 2020 onwards [7]. Population of India is expected to reach from 1027 million to 1930 million by 2025. Food grain requirement will be raised to 350 million tons by 2025 [1]. To meet this requirement there are two options either increase the gross area under irrigation or increase the water use efficiency. As water is becoming limiting resource, there is no scope to increase irrigated area by using additional water. Hence, only way to increase food production is by increasing the water use efficiency. For this purpose water saving
and more yielding irrigation methods have to be used. Micro-irrigation systems satisfy this requirement.
