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ABSTRACT Egypt is presently involved in a comprehensive program of land reclamation. Surface water has already been exhausted in meeting the urgent needs of agricultural expansion. If irrigation efficiency were increased, large amounts of surface water would be saved. However, this entails complex social, technical and political problems outside the scope of this paper. Ground‐water development has priority over increasing irrigation efficiency (which would take a longer time). This paper deals with identification of the intruded salt‐water wedge in the huge artesian Delta aquifer. The case is unique because most of this aquifer is invaded by salt water, and the major portion of its annual ground‐water recharge is derived from the direct seepage from the Nile River and the huge net of irrigation canals serving about 3 million acres (∼ 11,561 km 2 ) of fertile land, as well as the infiltration of excess irrigation water. The annual overall ground‐water recharge to the aquifer was estimated as 6·40 km 3 /yr as explained later. Methods of salt‐water control and various techniques of water resources management are discussed in this paper. Because of the great variation in the depth of the aquifer, two unconventional methods for identifying the salt‐water wedge are also presented.