Irrigation

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The artificial application of water to land for cultivation. The measurement distinction is directly examinable: net irrigated area is land irrigated at least once during the year, while gross irrigated area counts it separately for each crop irrigated, so the ratio between them measures how intensively irrigation is used rather than how far it reaches. Sources divide into canals, tanks, wells and tube wells, and the structural shift of recent decades has been decisively towards groundwater, because a tube well gives the individual cultivator control over timing that a shared canal system cannot, and it is precisely that private reliability which has driven over-extraction while surface systems run below capacity. The efficiency argument follows, since flood irrigation loses a large share of the water applied whereas drip and sprinkler systems deliver it to the root zone. The deeper distortion is that free or heavily subsidised power for pumping removes any cost signal on extraction, so efficiency measures work against the prevailing incentive.