WEB BASED ON-FARM WATER MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION SYSTEM IN SRI LANKA.

Abstract

Scarcity of Water resource is getting more and more serious to the irrigated Agriculture and ecological system in Sri Lanka. Improvement of irrigation water management is an important measure to save water and increase water use efficiency (WUE). Decision making on irrigation is one of the most complicated activities undertaken by irrigation planners, managers, marketing agents, manufacturers, academics and farmers. Therefore, a Management Information System has been developed to improve the On-Farm Water Management. This study was conducted to develop a user-friendly web based On- Farm water management and information System, using appropriate information and communication, computer technologies to make available the irrigation-related information to Sri Lanka. The Postgraduate Institute of Agriculture (PGIA) has been in existence since 1975. Over the years, it has developed to be a centre of excellence in postgraduate education in Agriculture in the country as well as in the region. Department of agricultural engineering provides quality stranded education and skills through their specialized study tools and disseminates the irrigation related information. According to their requirements, this system allows retrieval facility for information on major soil types and their properties, meteorological stations available in a district, climate parameters records which are needed to On-Farm Water Management such as temperature, rainfall, win speed, radiation, relative humidity and reference crop evapotranspiration. Further, for the calculation of crop water requirements and irrigation scheduling. Also, this web based system provides recommendation on irrigation method suitable for a particular location based on infiltration rate, hydraulic conductivity, available water capacity and irrigation water quality. In addition to that, details on irrigation expertise and training tools are provided for academic and research interests. This web based Management Information System was developed using PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor, which is a powerful server-side scripting language, and Apache as the web server. MySQL was used as the Database Management System. This combination ensures a high portability to the system. Finally the developed system was named as IrriMIS and thoroughly tested to guarantee a validated system.