Vol. 10, Issue 3 (2021)

Author(s):
M Sharath Chandra, RK Naresh, Rahul Kumar, Shipra Yadav, Jana Harish, Pradeep Rajput, Akshay Ujjwal and Shakti Om Pathak

Abstract:
Scare water resource or water shortage are one of the major constraint to sustaining and increasing the productivity of rice-wheat systems and limiting primary world issues, particularly India for food security and according to climate change projections, it will be more critical in the future. Since water availability and accessibility are the most significant constraining factors for crop production, addressing this issue is indispensable for areas affected by water scarcity. Saving water can be challenging in that minimizing field losses of precipitation, percolation, and runoff will not inevitably save water if it can be recovered at any other temporal or spatial scale, such as groundwater pumping. Many rice-wheat production technologies tend to save significant quantities of water by reducing the irrigation water demand, but it is unclear if these are real water savings although water balance components have not been quantified. For improving land as well as water productivity, the number of resource conservation technologies include laser levelling, direct drilling, raised beds, non-ponded rice cultivation, micro irrigation and scheduling for irrigation. To encourage the adoption of many water-saving technologies, rehabilitation and enhancement of channel and power systems in Asia, financed by charging according to usage, are needed. Based on awareness of the likely amount of irrigation water available each season and crop water usage requirement, they are able to schedule their plantings, and thus avoid wasting water and financial loss through overplanting and crop failure. These strategies have the potential to increase Asia's output of food and water, but the challenge will be to implement them in a way that benefits many millions of subsistence farmers. This compiled review literature comparing irrigation water productivities (IWPs) and water-scarcity footprints (WSFs) for rice-wheat production at high spatial resolution to provide evidence supporting environmentally safe water use and adoption of latest resource conservation technologies to improve water productivity by proposing potential solutions to address water scarcity for sustainable rice-wheat production.