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The north-eastern region of India, although rich in land and water resources, often suffers from a water-scarce situation particularly during the non-rainy season. The steep terrain conditions do not support conventional irrigation systems and therefore micro-irrigation system needs to be promoted. In micro-irrigation systems, maintaining uniformity of application is necessary to achieve a satisfactory crop yield. Maintaining the system hydraulics is a challenge due to the terrain conditions and equipment available. A study was conducted to observe various uniformity parameters of selected emitters at five different operating pressures, viz. 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.25 and 1.5 kg cm–2. In the study it was observed that the discharge variation of the selected emitters was between 8.7 and 39.7%. The uniformity coefficient varied from 0.9 to 16.6, where the distribution uniformity and statistical uniformity varied from 81.1 to 99.1% and 83.4–99.1% respectively. The emitter flow variation ranged from 0.03 to 0.49 in the range of 0.51.5 kg cm–2. The emitter exponent indicated that the values ranged from 0.20 to 0.55. All these values were far from the manufacturer's value. From the study we can interpret that the emitting system needs to be tested before adoption in the field to ensure uniformity of water application. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.