Development of Framework to Estimate Crop-wise, Region-wise Electricity Usage for Irrigation

Abstract

In this work, we develop a framework to estimate region-wise, crop-wise electricity usage for irrigation using secondary datasets. The main secondary datasets considered were electricity consumption in agricultural feeders, Minor Irrigation Census data for water sources, Groundwater Survey and Development Agency data on well depth, theoretical crop water requirement from various sources, cropping area and rainfall recordings from the Department of Agriculture. Three case studies on an area each in Nasik, Nanded and Kolhapur district of Maharashtra were done to verify the efficacy of the framework at the village level. In these cases, we find that the amount of irrigation water used by farmers largely abides by the theoretical requirement. Hence, the cropping pattern and total electricity used in a region, whether at feeder level, taluka level or district level, can be used to find average energy consumption per acre by a particular crop within that geographical boundary. We find that farmers use water sources in many indirect ways which complicate their use in the framework. Also, the secondary data on water sources is unreliable; hence, water heads and sources cannot be used to calculate energy usage. The method developed here can be used in states with a dominant number of irrigators supplied by agricultural feeders.