Abstract:
Irrigation schemes have no doubt contributed tremendously to increase food production in
order to meet the demand of the world population. Performance evaluation of this scheme
plays a vital role in identifying the gaps and applying mitigation measures. This study
was initiated to assess and evaluate the performance of Anjeb small scale irrigation
scheme using internal, external maintenance indicators, and assessment of institutional
and support services so as to recommend appropriate measures to improve the scheme
management and performance. To undertake this study primary data like discharge
measurements in the canals, measurement of depth of water applied to the farmers‟ field,
field observations, interviewing beneficiary farmers, and determination of moisture
contents of the soil before and after irrigation, and secondary data were collected from the
secondary sources. The results obtained showed that the main canal conveyance
efficiency of unlined main canal one and lined main canal two were 76.87% and 94.16%
respectively. The conveyance efficiency of the secondary canal-1 one and secondary
canal-2 were 86.45% and 94.01% respectively. The Application efficiency results on
three farmers‟ farm on initial, development and late crop growth seasons were found to be
72.13%, %, 69.30% and 64.43% respectively. The average storage efficiency results were
found to be 76.17%, 72.94% and 67.06% at initial, development and late growing stages
respectively. The sustainability of the scheme is also in doubt in that currently it is
irrigating only 68.8% of the developed land due to water shortage. The average deep
percolation ratio was found to be 31.38 %.The effectiveness of infrastructure was 33.01%
and overall irrigation efficiency of the scheme was 60.30%.The project recover its cost
after 8years. Based on the assessment of farmer‟s perception about the performance of the
irrigation scheme, the respondents believe that major problems made the scheme to be
mainly sedimentation problem exist, growing of weed, illegal off takes, poor condition of
canal, unauthorized diversion of water by the farmers into their farm and leakage of water
in the aqueduct as the author visualized at site survey. In conclusion, the overall
performance of the scheme is rated as low. Therefore proper institutional setup, scheme
monitoring and upgrading needs to be in place and WUA should be empowered in order
for it to discharge its responsibility.
Keyword: - Application Efficiency, Conveyance Efficiency, Storage efficiency,
Maintenance Indicator