Rebuilding soil hydrological functioning by adopting conservation agriculture in the degraded lands of India’s North-West Himalayan region

• Studied soil hydraulic properties and dominant flow patterns for the Himalayan region. • Soil hydraulic conductivity was highest in forest and lowest in conventional tillage. • Macropore’s comprised small space of total soil volume but contributed highest towards flow. • Dominant flow patterns improved from conventional tillage to conservation agriculture. • Conservation agriculture restored soil’s hydro-physical properties near to forest. Assessing soil hydraulic properties after the land use transition from forest to agriculture is essential for understanding the recovery potential of hydrological processes. The present research is oriented toward assessing the variations in saturated and near-saturated hydraulic conductivity of the surface and subsurface soil layer and its implication on dominant flow paths under four land uses {forest, conventional tillage (CT), reduced tillage (RT), and zero tillage (ZT)} of the north-western Indian Himalayas. The hydraulic conductivity at three pressure heads was estimated from steady state infiltration rate measured using a hood infiltrometer. The highest median surface hydraulic conductivity was observed under forest and lowest for CT. The macropores at the surface soil layer contributed 62.0–73.4 %, while the subsurface layer contributed 65.6–76.1 % of the total flow across the land uses. The higher macropores’ contribution to total flow may be due to improved soil structure. Under extreme rainfall intensity (218.4 mm h −1 , 50-year return period), all land uses showed increased infiltration-excess overland flow (IOF) due to limited surface and subsurface conductivity. Forest land use maintained the highest subsurface flow (SSF, 42.5 %), lower IOF (38.2 %), and the greatest soil water storage. In contrast, CT produced the highest IOF (84.1 %) and lowest SSF (4.4 %), indicating greater runoff and erosion risk. Furthermore, regardless of the return period, the SSF and deep percolation (DP) improved, while the IOF decreased when the duration of maximum rainfall intensity was raised from 5 to 60 min. Our results highlight that for the Himalayan region having high rainfall intensity, although converting land use from forest to CT generated overland flow, by changing land management to conservation agriculture, IOF diminished and restored SSF and DP. We, therefore, conclude that adopting conservation agriculture on degraded land can alter the dominant flow paths and rebuild the hydrological functioning of the soil.