Babhulgaon - Maratha's Village Developing by Irrigation Rush and Sugarcane Cultivation

In this paper authors tried to elucidate a salient features of imbalanced regional growth in drought-prone area of central part: of Maharashtra, where peoples have long been suffering from persistent severe droughts. Babhulgaon selected by authors as a sample survey village is classified agroclimatically into semi-arid zone with annual rainfalls less than 500mm. Babhulgaon comes under the jurisdiction of Malshiras taluku, with population of 1331 and household of 183, out of which 130 households belong to Maratha community. Although almost of all parts of this taluka are being well irrigated by Nira canal system, constructed in 1885 at the time of British rules, Babhulgaon has long been less favored with locational conditions and could not keep pace with developmental processes in these flourishing sugar producing areas before mid- 1970's, not only because village was not covered by command areas of Nira canal system, but also because village is situated at the upland with 20-40m high above Bima river bed, thus the villagers could not use its abundant water resources. Before 1974, most prevalent mode of agriculture was dry farming with few cases of well irrigation, producing meagre amount of jowar, baira, beans and other anti-drought crops. Epoch-making new era in Babhulgaon with irrigation project in 1974. Lift up with height of 20m was installed beside Bima river. Irrigation water is firstly pumped up to the terrace on which main settlement is located, then it flows down. By doing so, 60 ha of land on terrace was brought under irrigation. In 1984 irrigation water was bifurcated from Ujjni canal system. From these sources, water is pumped up by pipeline to dryland on the higher terrace and private wells were also dugged for increasing acreage of sugarcane alongside the distributary channels. It means that substantial amount of water is filled indirectly by distributary channels. For it runs above the wells, ground water level in each well is to naturally heighted. Maharashtra government supplies limited amount o<特集> インド干ばつ常習地域の村落変