Author(s)

Deepak Bornare^1,2*, Ramakrishna Nagarajan¹, Rajiv Barge³

¹Center of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India.
²Department of Agriculture Engineering, Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Aurangabad, India.
³Eco Nutrivet Biosolutions Division, Pune, India.

Rain-fed agriculture depends on the groundwater as a supplementary source of irrigation. The poor quality of water from the hard rock area is applied to the crops to save the crop. Continuous irrigation leads to degradation of soil, drip irrigation system as well plants. This study assessed the damages on the drip irrigation system and soil, inflicted by the use of low-quality irrigation water. The quality of water was improved with reference to raw water in terms of pH (1.57% - 5.88%), EC (3.08% - 10.08%), ions (0.96% - 46%) by using magnetization method, without disrupting the existing irrigation system in the basaltic aquifer in semi-arid to the arid condition. This was demonstrated before the farmers in central India.

Supplementary Irrigation, Low Water Quality, Hard Rock Aquifer, Dissolved Salts, Semi-Arid Region, Magnetization Method

Bornare, D. , Nagarajan, R. and Barge, R. (2018) Improvement of Supplementary Irrigation Water Quality for Rain-Fed Agriculture in the Semi-Arid Region Using Magnetization Techniques. Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 10, 1198-1209. doi: 10.4236/jwarp.2018.1012071.