Ken River Irrigation and Traditional Water Heritage of Panna

The Ken River provides Panna district primary irrigation through a series of medium dams and diversion weirs. Traditional water management in the plateau areas above the Ken valley relied on village tanks — called talab or sagar — built by Bundela Rajput administrators as part of a systematic programme of rural infrastructure. Panna state historical records document over 200 tank construction projects carried out between 1650 and 1850. The tank maintenance system assigned cleaning responsibility to downstream beneficiary farmers, enforced through social sanction rather than legal mechanism. Well irrigation using rope-and-wheel systems — the rahat — was common in alluvial areas until electric pumps replaced them. Traditional groundwater prospecting by experienced farmers — reading soil colour, vegetation type, and topographic position — was the basis for well siting before modern geophysical surveys.