Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Agriculture takes more than eighty per cent of India’s available water. After twenty years of effort, micro irrigation covers 115 lakh hectares. Work out what that is as a share of the sown area and the figure is 8.11 per cent.
The Press Information Bureau’s research unit published More Crop Per Drop with Water-Smart Farming on 29 August 2026 at 12.34 pm, explainer number 159757, drawing on the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, the Per Drop More Crop portal, the NITI Aayog evaluation of 2020-21, the Economic Survey 2020-21 and a 2023 study by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. It is today’s document, and it is unusually willing to publish its own coverage ratio.
The two numbers that frame the problem
The explainer opens with the constraint. More than 80 per cent of the country’s available water resources go to agricultural irrigation, while only about 50 per cent of the net sown area has irrigation at all. Water use efficiency, it says, has therefore become a national priority.
Against that, the achievement. Per Drop More Crop had brought 115 lakh hectares under micro irrigation by July 2026 — which the document itself puts at 8.11 per cent of India’s net sown area. Blitz India worked the implication both ways. Eight point one one per cent implies a net sown area of about 141.8 million hectares, which is consistent with the published national figure. And it means that 91.89 per cent of the sown area is still watered by older methods. The scheme has not failed; it has, on its own published arithmetic, barely started.
What the money buys
The support is a capital subsidy, capped at five hectares per beneficiary. Small and marginal farmers receive 55 per cent of cost, other farmers 45 per cent, and a farmer may come back for assistance on the same land after seven years. The Centre released ₹8,123.24 crore over the last three years — ₹2,707.75 crore a year, recomputed. Some states add a subsidy of their own from their budgets.
In 2025-26, ₹8,957.72 crore was released or approved for the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana as a whole, of which ₹3,226.36 crore was dedicated to Per Drop More Crop. Recomputed, micro irrigation took 36.02 per cent of the parent scheme’s money in that year. The scheme reached 12.30 lakh farmers, about 20 per cent of them women — some 2.46 lakh women. Divide the one by the other and the average central support works out to about ₹26,231 a farmer.
Coverage, cost and the evidence
| Parameter / Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Area under micro irrigation, July 2026 | 115 lakh hectares |
| Share of net sown area | 8.11 per cent |
| Sown area still outside | 91.89 per cent |
| Implied net sown area | About 141.8 million hectares |
| Subsidy, small and marginal farmers | 55 per cent of cost |
| Subsidy, other farmers | 45 per cent of cost |
| Cap per beneficiary | Five hectares |
| Repeat assistance on the same land | After seven years |
| Central assistance, last three years | ₹8,123.24 crore — ₹2,707.75 crore a year |
| PM-RKVY released or approved, 2025-26 | ₹8,957.72 crore |
| Of which Per Drop More Crop | ₹3,226.36 crore — 36.02 per cent |
| Farmers reached, 2025-26 | 12.30 lakh, about 20 per cent women |
| Average central support a farmer | About ₹26,231 |
| Water use efficiency gain, NITI Aayog | 30 to 70 per cent |
| Income gain, NITI Aayog | 10 to 69 per cent |
Source: Press Information Bureau research unit explainer 159757, More Crop Per Drop with Water-Smart Farming, posted 29 August 2026, citing the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, NITI Aayog (2020-21), Economic Survey 2020-21 and IIM Ahmedabad (2023). The coverage complement, the annual average, the scheme share and the per-farmer figure recomputed by Blitz India. Photograph note, Circular BIMG/CIR/2026/02. No copyright-clean photograph of this subject, taken on this date, could be verified from this session, and the circular bars an old picture, a stock image and a news-agency picture alike. Rather than ship an unverified filename, the desk carries this in-house Blitz data card at the exact point where the picture would run.
What the independent studies establish
Three evaluations are named, and the desk sets them out with their ranges intact rather than as single numbers. The NITI Aayog evaluation carried out during 2020-21 found the scheme aligned with national priorities and recorded income gains of 10 to 69 per cent and improvements in water use efficiency of 30 to 70 per cent. The Economic Survey 2020-21 quantified resource gains from micro irrigation: water saving of 20 to 48 per cent, energy saving of 10 to 17 per cent, labour cost reduction of 30 to 40 per cent, fertiliser saving of 11 to 19 per cent, and yield increases of 20 to 38 per cent. A 2023 study by IIM Ahmedabad across six states found farmers adopting micro irrigation chiefly to cope with falling groundwater levels and to suit their own crop requirements.
Those are wide ranges, and the width is the honest part. A drip system on acid lime in Andhra Pradesh and a sprinkler on groundnut in Saurashtra are not the same investment. The document carries one farm account: LAM Srinivas Rao of Palnadu, Andhra Pradesh, who replaced flood irrigation with drip and fertigation on a two-acre acid lime orchard, and whose yield rose from 90 to 105 quintals an acre — 16.67 per cent, recomputed — with net income rising from ₹1.5 lakh to ₹2.85 lakh, a gain of ₹1.35 lakh. The cost-of-cultivation figures in that account do not read consistently against a two-acre holding, and this desk has left them out rather than reproduce them.
The change worth watching
The most consequential item in the document is administrative and easy to miss. Under revised guidelines, the funding ceiling on water conservation and storage activity has been removed. Earlier a general state or union territory could spend no more than 20 per cent of its allocation on such work, and the north-eastern and Himalayan states and the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh no more than 40 per cent. States are now free to exceed those limits according to local need, and the “other interventions” component supports diggis — large storage tanks or farm ponds — and water harvesting structures.
That matters because a drip system without assured water is an expensive pipe. Storage is what makes micro irrigation work in a year when the rain comes late. Removing the cap is the government treating the two as one problem, which they are.
One suggestion, and it concerns the number this whole report turns on. The coverage figure is published nationally; it is not published in the same place state by state, nor set against each state’s own sown area. If the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare put out a single annual table — state, net sown area, area under micro irrigation, coverage percentage, area added that year — the country could see where the 91.89 per cent actually lies, and states could be compared against their own irrigation potential rather than against each other’s absolute hectares. The data exists in the scheme’s own monitoring system. Publishing it as one table would turn a national percentage into a working map.
