Haryana Irrigation and Canals: WYC, Bhakra and SYL Canal

Haryana has no perennial river of its own worth the name except the Yamuna on its eastern edge, yet it is one of the most intensively irrigated states in India. That is because almost every drop it uses is brought in by canal from the Yamuna and the Sutlej or pumped up from below the ground. Irrigation is therefore both the backbone of the state's agriculture and the subject of its longest legal dispute, the Sutlej Yamuna Link canal.

The two canal systems

The state's canals come from two sources. The Yamuna system is the older one. The Western Yamuna Canal was first cut in the fourteenth century in the time of Firoz Shah Tughlaq to carry Yamuna water westwards to Hisar, and the British remodelled it in the nineteenth century with headworks at Tajewala. Since 1999 the canal has been fed by the Hathnikund barrage in Yamunanagar district, which replaced Tajewala and also feeds the Eastern Yamuna Canal of Uttar Pradesh. Its branches, among them the Hansi, Butana, Sirsa, Jind and Delhi branches, water the central districts. Lower down the Yamuna, the Agra Canal and the Gurgaon Canal take off at the Okhla barrage and serve Faridabad, Palwal and the Nuh and Gurugram tract.

The second source is the Sutlej through the Bhakra Nangal project, which Haryana shares with Punjab and Rajasthan. The Bhakra Main Line and its Narwana branch bring Sutlej water into Hisar, Fatehabad, Sirsa, Jind and Bhiwani, the districts that have no Yamuna command. Because the land rises towards the Aravalli fringe in the south, water there has to be pumped: the Jawaharlal Nehru lift canal and the Loharu lift canal raise water in stages for Bhiwani, Mahendragarh, Charkhi Dadri and Rewari, and these lift schemes are what make cultivation possible in the driest corner of the state.

The Sutlej Yamuna Link canal

When Haryana was carved out of Punjab in 1966 it claimed a share of the Ravi and Beas waters, and a link canal was planned to carry that share from the Sutlej to the Yamuna. The agreement of 1981 between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan allotted Haryana about 3.5 million acre feet, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone of the canal in 1982 at Kapoori village in Patiala district. Haryana built its length of about ninety-one kilometres; Punjab stopped work on its longer stretch, and in 2004 the Punjab assembly passed the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act to undo the water agreements. On a presidential reference the Supreme Court held in 2016 that this Act was not constitutionally valid, and the case over completing the canal continues in the court. For the exam, the chain to remember is 1966, 1981, 1982, 2004 and 2016.

Methods of applying water

Surface methods still dominate. In border strip and check basin irrigation the field is levelled and divided into plots enclosed by small bunds or levees and flooded in turn, which suits the heavy paddy and wheat fields of the north. Furrow irrigation is used for row crops like cotton, sugarcane and vegetables. Where the land is uneven or the soil is sandy and easily eroded, sprinklers are better, because they spread water like rain and do not need levelling; the sandy south-west of Haryana is exactly such country. Drip irrigation, which delivers water to the root zone through emitters, is promoted for orchards, cotton and vegetables and saves the most water. The state subsidises both sprinkler and drip systems as micro irrigation.

Groundwater and its problems

Tubewells irrigate nearly as much land as canals, and that has created two opposite problems. In the paddy belt of Kurukshetra, Karnal, Kaithal and Ambala the water table has fallen sharply, and many blocks are classed as over-exploited. In parts of Rohtak, Jhajjar, Sirsa and Fatehabad the opposite has happened: canal seepage and flat land without drainage have raised the water table, which brings waterlogging and salts to the surface. The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute at Karnal works on reclaiming such land with subsurface drainage and salt-tolerant varieties. To cut water use the state has run a crop diversification scheme, Mera Pani Meri Virasat, that pays farmers to replace paddy with maize, pulses, cotton or bajra, and it has set up a water resources authority to regulate extraction.

Shared rivers and institutions

Because every source is shared, Haryana is a party to several water arrangements: the 1981 Ravi-Beas agreement, the Bhakra Beas Management Board for the Sutlej works, and the 1994 memorandum on the upper Yamuna with Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi, which the Upper Yamuna River Board administers. Proposed storages upstream, such as the Lakhwar and Renukaji projects, would give the state a firmer summer supply. The pattern an aspirant should carry away is simple: Yamuna water in the east and centre, Sutlej water in the west, lifts in the south, tubewells everywhere, and a canal to the north-west that has been argued over for four decades.