UP Irrigation, Canals and Power Projects for Exams

Uttar Pradesh farms more irrigated land than any other state, and it does so on a plain with no great natural reservoir sites. The answer has been canals cut from the rivers as they leave the hills, and millions of tube wells sunk into the shallow groundwater of the Ganga plain. The same plain has almost no hydro power, so the state meets its demand from coal, which is why its power map is crowded into one south-eastern corner. Questions from this chapter are place based: the river a canal starts from, the district a station stands in, the lake a dam holds back.

How Uttar Pradesh is irrigated

Tube wells water the largest share of the irrigated area of the state, canals come next, and tanks, ponds and lift schemes follow far behind. Groundwater is cheap to tap in the central and eastern districts where the water table is high, while the western districts combine canal water with private tube wells. The consequence is the familiar pair of problems: waterlogging and salinity in the old canal tracts, and falling water tables in the heavily pumped western belt.

The canal systems

The Eastern Yamuna Canal is the oldest of these, a Mughal period channel later remodelled by British engineers. The Upper Ganga Canal was the great engineering feat of its day, opened in 1854 and built under Sir Proby Cautley, who carried the canal over streams on aqueducts and set the pattern for every later canal in northern India. The Lower Ganga Canal followed in 1878 from Narora, and the Agra Canal in 1874 from Okhla. The Sharda Canal, commissioned in 1928 from Banbasa, took water into Awadh, and after independence the Sharda Sahayak project linked the Sharda to the Ghaghara through a feeder channel so that one system could water sixteen districts of central and eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Dams and reservoirs

The state's reservoirs sit on its southern and northern edges. The Ramganga project, with its dam at Kalagarh, stores water for Moradabad, Rampur, Bareilly and Budaun. The Rihand dam at Pipri in Sonbhadra holds back the Rihand, a tributary of the Son, and its reservoir, named Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar, is the largest man made lake in India by surface area. On the Betwa, the Matatila dam and the Rajghat dam are shared with Madhya Pradesh and serve Bundelkhand, while the Bansagar dam on the Son in Madhya Pradesh is shared by Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and feeds a canal into Mirzapur and Prayagraj. The Gandak project, built with Nepal and Bihar, waters Maharajganj, Kushinagar and Deoria in the east. The Ken Betwa Link Project, the country's first river linking scheme, is being built to carry Ken water to the Betwa and relieve the Bundelkhand districts of Jhansi, Banda, Lalitpur and Mahoba.

Where the power comes from

When Uttarakhand was separated in 2000 it took most of the hill hydel stations with it, so Uttar Pradesh today leans on coal. Sonbhadra district in the far south east, sitting on the Singrauli coalfield beside the Rihand reservoir, carries so many stations that it is called the energy capital of the state. Obra and Anpara are the big state sector plants there, while NTPC runs the Singrauli super thermal station at Shaktinagar, its first power project in the country, and the Rihand super thermal station at Bijpur.

Outside Sonbhadra, NTPC runs the Dadri station in Gautam Buddh Nagar, the Unchahar station in Rae Bareli, the Tanda station in Ambedkar Nagar and the Meja station near Prayagraj, and the state sector runs Panki at Kanpur, Harduaganj at Aligarh, Parichha at Jhansi and Jawaharpur at Etah. Hydel generation is small and comes from the Rihand, Obra and Matatila stations and from drops on the canal network. The one atomic station in the state is the Narora Atomic Power Station in Bulandshahr district, on the Ganga, which runs two pressurised heavy water reactors of 220 megawatts each. Solar parks in Bundelkhand and Mirzapur are the newest addition, placed where land is dry and cheap.