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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Farm ponds that dot parched Marathwada may deplete groundwater in the long run -Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar

Farm ponds that dot parched Marathwada may deplete groundwater in the long run -Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar

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published Published on Apr 24, 2019   modified Modified on Apr 24, 2019
-The Times of India

AURANGABAD: A patchwork of brown fields is visible from the air as you fly into this drought-hit region in rural Maharashtra. But amid the dry land is a growing mosaic of blue and brown squares and rectangles.

These are farm ponds: Large earthen structures that have spread across rural Maharashtra in the past five years, thanks to a raft of central and state subsidies.

The ponds were conceived to catch and store rainwater, and are especially useful for fruits such as grapes that require year-round irrigation,

But as they have proliferated on a large scale, and are often filled from wells, experts have become concerned about their long-term effect on groundwater levels.

“Farm ponds have some value for irrigation,” said Eshwar Kale of the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR). “But they can lead to privatization of water by a few and, on a large scale, these schemes take no account of the carrying capacity of the watershed.”

Pond numbers have shot up since 2016, when the state’s Farm Pond on Demand Scheme began offering up to Rs 50,000 reimbursement to eligible farmers. Close to 1.2 lakh ponds have been built under the scheme so far (more than three lakh farmers applied for it) at a cost of around Rs 540 crore.

Thousands more have been built under other schemes over the years, including the National Horticulture Mission and still more have been set up privately, for which there is no data. Near Aurangabad, for instance, a prosperous farmer with 12 acres along the highway has two plastic-lined full ponds—one that he funded himself and another with a government subsidy.

Studies from institutions such as the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics have found that while these ponds benefit individual farmers, allowing them to grow high-value crops, they also favour larger famers who have access to water, capital to invest, and adequate land; Maharashtra’s scheme requires farm sizes of at least 1.5 acres.

Many farmers also line their ponds with plastic and fill them from borewells, not rainfall runoff.

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The Times of India, 16 April, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/aurangabad/farm-ponds-that-dot-parched-marathwada-may-deplete-groundwater-in-the-long-run/articleshow/68895391.cms?utm_sour


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