Introduction:

Irrigation refers to the artificial application of water to land to assist in the growth of crops. It is a difficult to do agricultural practice, especially in areas where rainfall is insufficient or irregular, allowing farmers to maintain soil moisture and support plant growth. The irrigational development in India.

Irrigation is everything in rural India. Irrigation farms the delimit for successful agriculture water being more valuable than land for even gold. The government has accorded irrigation a high place in the national development plans. India is richly endowed with perennial rivers and tributaries. it has a largest water resources in the world but is not a position of water fully. Supply of water from the sources to the agriculture land is called irrigation

Importance of irrigation:

• Promoting the greater utilization of land
• Enlarging the average size of the farm
• Generating demand for additional farm labor
• Bringing a shift in crop pattern in favor of new and  improve varieties of crops
• Increasing additional productive investment in farm business.
• Bringing favorable input output ratio.
• Widening the scope for increase in land revenue and other local receipts.
• Reducing instability in output level.
• Introducing multiple cropping.
• Contributing to agricultural price stability.

Irrigation Development in India.

Before partition of the country net area irrigated in the Indian subcontinent was a largest in the world. The country however received severe blows in the field of irrigation when it lost nearly 30% of its best irrigated areas as a result of the partition of the country in 1947.

To off-set drastic reduction in irrigated are as great emphasis was placed on irrigation. when an era of planning begin in 1951. During the last 6 decades over 2200 big and small irrigation projects have been taken up, they include various types of barrages and canals nearly 1400 of them have already been completed by the end of 10th plan which ended in March 2007. The remaining have been carried over to 11^th plan which started from April 1 2007 and was continued for a 5 years ending march 31, 2012.

Physical progress of irrigation over the period has been impressive. At the beginning of the planned era in 1951 total member of large dams height 15 M [meters] and above was 280.

However after 1951 the number of large dams rose rapidly and now there are more than 4500 majority of which have already been computed some important projects of various States with ultimate irrigation potential more than two lakh hectares and which are either completed since independence or are under the various stages of construction.

Irrigation development started from 10th plan that is 2002-2007 from the data present can be seen that irrigation potential at a beginning of first plan was 22.6 Mha [ million hectares, which is a unit of measurement used in irrigation] which increase to 123.3 Mha by end of 10th plan.

Out of this 42.3 Mha is from major and medium schemes at and the remaining 81 Mha from minor schemes. The percentage of utilization of total created potential 90% to 95% up to 1980. There after lag between potentials created and utilized went on increasing from 9th plan utilization percentage is around 74%  maximum annual irrigation under any project is called irrigation potential of the project.

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