The last two years have seen some progress in expediting completion of unfinished major and minor canal projects.
Pune: Sustained
efforts over the last two years to improve irrigation access for
farmers in India seem to have begun showing results, at least in terms
of creation of physical infrastructure.
The Narendra Modi
government had, in 2016, embarked on a mission to complete all
unfinished major and medium irrigation projects – some of these
languishing for decades – under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits
Programme (AIBP). Two years on – the mission was announced in the Union
Budget presented on February 29, 2016 – the progress has been quite
impressive, going by the information made available by the Ministry of
Water Resources.
Out of the total 105 projects targeted for
completion before December 2019, work in as many as 41 is either over or
at least 90 per cent finished. The 41 include all the 18 ‘Priority I’
projects that were supposed to have been completed by the end of 2017.
There are another 32 projects, categorised under ‘Priority II’, which
are to be completed this year. The remaining 55 ‘Priority III’ projects
have a deadline of December next year.
The Ministry’s data shows
that in 16 projects – including nine in the ‘Priority II’ and seven in
the ‘Priority III’ lists – between 80 and 90 per cent of work has been
completed. Further, in 57 out of the total 105 projects, there has been
minimum 80 per cent work completion. That ratio, at 54 per cent, isn’t
bad, considering that we still have more than one-and-a-half years to go
for the terminal date of December 2019.
The 105 projects
together are expected to bring an additional 6.7 million hectares (mh)
of cultivable land under irrigation. Here again, the works undertaken
till February 2018 have already created nearly 4.4 mh of new irrigation
potential, which is 65 per cent of the target set for December 2019.
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