Promoting Irrigation Sustainability with Saline Water: The Way Forward

Increasing water scarcity is recognized as a key challenge to sustainable development, especially in the context of global warming. The unconventional water resources provide an emerging opportunity to narrow the water demand-supply gap. These include marginal-quality waters mainly the saline ground/drainage and treated effluent. The saline groundwater aquifers rather exist in arid and semiarid regions facing severe water scarcity. With ever-growing water quality challenges, research, practice, and developmental efforts are leading to techniques for the safe and sustainable management of saline and alkali waters in agriculture, horticulture, and other halophytic plants of economic value. However, some issues requiring further attention of researchers for these fragile soils include the farmer’s preferred high-value and high-productivity crops, temporal transformations in soil structure under field conditions especially during the rainy season and under high Mg conditions, enhancing capabilities of process-based analytical models to replace to laborious and expansive long-term field experiments, refining amendment needs and their alternatives to reduce recurring costs with alkali water irrigation, using precision tools for increasing nutrient use efficiency, means to promote conservation agriculture (CA), organics such as biochar, plant growth regulators, and multi-enterprise activities. Policy initiatives to better harness the potential of saline irrigation waters include modifications in surface water delivery schedules, groundwater pumping costs, subsidies on amendments and micro-irrigation systems, promoting conjunctive uses, participatory approaches, and up-scaling the skills of stakeholders.