An Economic Analysis of Technology Adoption Coupled With Conjunctive Use of Ground Water in Tank Command Area

This paper aims to evaluate the conjunctive use of surface and ground water, adoption of water management technologies and factors which influence the adoption of water management technologies in the tank command area since water scarcity problem is becoming major concern in most of the districts in Tamil Nadu. Dindigul district was purposively selected for the study since there are about 3,104 tanks and 30 per cent of area was irrigated by tank to total net area irrigated. Tank irrigation was also supplemented with well (open well) irrigation (i.e. conjunctive use of surface water and ground water was playing significant role). Simple random sampling technique was employed for selecting the sample farmers. Primary data was collected from 150 sample farmers and multinomial logit model was used for analysis. The result revealed that the yield was higher for farmers adopting water management technologies under conjunctive water use situation. . The adopters of water management technologies had realized increased productivity and thereby the returns in rice crop were comparatively high the farming experience, income from off and non-farm activities and contact with extension agents were found to have positive and significant influence on adoption of technology. The farm size of the farmers had negative effect on adoption of technology.