Using Operators' Knowledge in Tilakan Irrigation and Drainage Network Study to Transfer the Network Management Compatible with Traditional Management

Iran is a dry and low rainfall country with the average rainfall of less than a third of universal average. Adaptation is the only way to deal with drought and Optimizing the use of water resources and improving the efficiency of water productivity are the ways of adaptation. One of the ways to increase the efficiency of water productivity is transferring the management from government to operators. This transferring process needs culture structuring and assessment to the requirements of operators. It could be possible with using the operators` knowledge at all levels such as sponsoring, decision making, designing, performing, operating and keeping. In developing countries, operators' stagger to network performance is one of the limiting factors to transfer irrigation management and also caused to being useless part of irrigation and drainage networks. In this irrigation networks, designing is generally based on technical and physical principles, without paying attention to social relationship and social problems. The purpose of this study is to make premise for the formation of participatory irrigation and drainage network management (PIM), with use of traditional farmer knowledge and study the traditional method of Kor lake water transfer to Tilakan (and other upstream and downstream) diversion dam fields .Traditional irrigation and drainage network of Tilakan is located on Kor River, Doroudzan dam downstream, in the Korbal plain, east of Shiraz. Dorudzan network consist of 2 part, korbal plan (downstream network) in the end of kor river near the bakhtegan lake , and upstream network that is located downstream of dorudzan dam. Korbakl plan have been irrigated whit 6 historical diversion dams named amir dam , feizabad dam , tilakan dam ,mavan dam , jahan abad dam and hasan abad dam. these historical dams age is between 400 to 2000 years. some historical indicates cause that the present kor river is a hand-make cannal had been built at the hakhamaneshian age.In the beginning of the second stage of the Tilakan network design on the Kor River, the current situation of operation, irrigation and water management systems as well as decision system among owners, joint owners and retailers were investigated. The results showed that this network design considerably prepared the current water distribution system in that region and its included farms. Also, due to specific object of this design- management transition to operators, a new network design was necessary to keep both the management system and traditional water distributing system. For more investigation and use of farmers' knowledge in network design, the local committees consist of water distributers and water workers of each village and farms was constructed by voting of all operators at each village. At this stage, with assessing the operators' suggestions base on their farming knowledge and considering the technical and economical aspects, the network was designed to minimize the partnership problems in terms of the maintenance and operation. Describing the design options for operations at each farms, cooperative decision, convening several meetings with participated operators for maintaining the traditional irrigation management were the methods that used in this design.The results showed that use of operators traditional knowledge increased: the operators' communion in all levels of operation and maintenance management, the ability of operators to construct a local committee of operators, technical ability of operators for maintaining and operating of network.