Sreelatha Menon: Watershed change

EAR TO THE GROUND

Two villages in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh signed a unique eight-year MoU recently over use of a stream. The understanding requires that the village downstream pays user charges to the village upstream.

The village upstream on its part has to take good care of the land surrounding the stream that flows from its valley. One of the conditions is that it will have to keep its cattle and sheep away from the grazing area near the stream.

At the last moment, there was a little confusion over the user charges. The village upstream said it would not accept cash. Instead, it wanted saplings to be planted on the grazing land in the catchment area.

This is a payment model for watershed catchment areas which came about as a result of the intervention by a policy research project of the Delhi-based Winrock International, backed by the International Institute for Environment and Development and Department For International Development (DFID), UK.

Watershed development means lots of money in India where the government is spending crores for setting up watershed projects that are often neglected and washed away in rains the following year.

DFID funded the four-year study, which focused on payments for watershed services, a way of compensating wise use of land and water upstream that brings benefits to water users downstream.

"Ecosystems provide humanity with important services, such as water supplies, but markets rarely value these benefits," says Ivan Bond, a senior researcher at IIED. "Payments for watershed services are an attempt to correct this market failure in a way that brings social and environmental benefits. This will become increasingly important as the demand for land and water rises and as climate change begins to alter natural systems," he adds.

The researchers say that new payment schemes could make a difference if they are designed with specific watersheds and social contexts in mind and are led (and partially funded) by water users, particularly those in the private sector.

The researchers examined the potential of payments in two ways. They reviewed 48 active and 45 planned schemes in 24 developing countries. They also tried to develop and test payments systems in 10 watersheds in different countries in Asia, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, which would address both land use and livelihood challenges.

In India, four sites of watersheds were taken up for the programme. While the two villages in Kangra progressed to the stage of sighing an MoU, no agreement could be reached between two other Himachal villages, says Chetan Agarwal, senior programme officer of Winrock International in Gurgaon.

"If you keep investing money in watershed and don't work with people, the dividends will be low," he says.

The 'Hariyali' guidelines of the rural development ministry say that Rs 10,000 per hectare is needed for watershed development. The payment model would ensure that the money is not wasted.

"We are extending the idea from maintaining the physical asset to maintaining the environmental asset of a watershed project by guaranteeing the upkeep of a catchment area," says Agarwal.