Crop and Land Improvement under the Krishna East Bank Canal, (Madras State)

Abstract

With the excavation and opening of the Krishna East Bank canal in 1937 lands formerly under dry cultivation in the canal zone got converted into wet system of cultivation. In the conversion of the dry land into wet, of the ayacut under the East Bank Canal, changes in the cropping as well as changes in the condition of the soils have been brought about. In this canal ayacut, a crop of paddy is raised between June and December, followed by Sunnhemp, or pulses like green-gram, black-gram, pillipesara etc. In certain blocks of land, in this canal zone, as in the villages as Srikakulam, Tenuguraopalem etc., large blocks of land extending to thousands of acres get hardened in the top foot of the soil, with white alkali deposit caused by efflorescence. The pulse crop following the paddy is diminutive in size and presents a poor appearance. A number of bore wells in the area sunk for drinking water purposes have the level of water in them rising or falling with the level of water in the river Krishna. In flood time, the water level in the bores in high up while in other periods the level in the bores recedes to lower depths. In these bores, the sand substratum with the watershed is generally reached from a depth of seventy feet from the ground level. Water from this level is pushed up to 12 feet from the ground level, indicative of the subartesian nature of the watershed.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002426

Pages

293 - 294

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords