Solar powered micro-irrigation system for small holders of dryland agriculture in India

• Low cost solar energy based water lifting system has been designed for small size farm ponds.
• The performance of the developed system was found to be satisfactory over the standard parameters.
• Once such system is sufficient to provide irrigation in 0.5 acre land which suits to socio-economic conditions of most of the small holders of Indian dryland farming.
• The developed system can be widely implemented in the dryland farming conditions of the world and can substantiate to the issue of sustainable development of rural livelihood.

Small water harvesting ponds are crucial to sustain productivity by providing supplemental/life saving irrigation in the small holdings of Indian dryland agriculture. Applications of such water however, are always a major issue in these regions, since efficient and cost effective pumping system is generally not available. In order to achieve the holistic utilization of water resources, a gravity-fed type micro-irrigation system integrated with low cost solar based pumping system was designed. The system was designed considering the properties of flow characteristics derived from hydraulic study of different components of drip irrigation system. The system thus developed, has the capability to provide uniform emitter discharge over the small plot of 18 m × 6 m. The star configuration of micro-tube layout where the lateral line feed four rows as devised by Bhatnagar and Srivastva (2003), was successfully integrated in the developed irrigation system. The field experimentation and testing suggested that the system performance was found satisfactory as the flow rate variation, Christiansen uniformity coefficient and distribution uniformity were 18.96%, 93.65% and 91.55% respectively.