A watershed for development

FARM VIEW

Wasteland schemes could help fulfil the government's employment guarantee promise.

Watershed and wasteland development programmes offer the easiest course to achieve the government's avowed objective of providing 100 days of employment to a family.

In fact, these programmes have much larger employment- and income-generation potential than any other method. Significantly, this approach leads to the creation of natural assets to ensure means of livelihood for people even after government funding stops.

A watershed is essentially a geographically contiguous area draining into a common depression. As such, it becomes a natural unit of development planning.

Economic activities of local communities usually revolve around land and its productivity. Enhancing production capacity will result in higher employment and income generation with a consequential impact on other social parameters.

Realising this, the scientists of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) began working on models for watershed development way back in the mid-1970s.

The Dehradun-based Central Soil and Water Conservation and Training Institute had firmed up these models by the early 1980s, paving way for their wider adoption.

A national conference on resource conserving technologies for social upliftment, held in Delhi last week, pondered over the role watershed and wasteland development programmes can play in employment and income generation.

It recommended that the proposed programme for providing legally-mandated employment in 150 districts and massive food-for-work projects should follow this route to meet their goals.

According to ICAR Deputy Director-General J S Samra, an authority on participatory watershed development models, employment at the rate of an average 215 man-days a hectare can be generated for four to five years during the initial development phase of a watershed.

Afterwards, employment of 21 man-days a hectare a year is assured on a long-term basis. With over 107 million hectares of degraded land available in the country, these programmes offer huge employment- and income-generation potential.

Nearly 40 impact evaluation studies have already been conducted by various agencies in areas covered under watershed development projects. They have revealed multifarious benefits, including recharge of ground water aquifers; reduction in soil erosion; increase in the number of crops raised in a year; shift in cropping pattern in favour of higher value crops; higher crop productivity; reduction in migration to urban areas; improved vegetative cover; and increased employment avenues.

To enhance the returns from investment in the watershed development projects, Samra suggests the creation of micro-enterprises in these areas, with community participation. These could involve activities like dairy farming, sheep and goat husbandry, poultry, bee-keeping, mushroom cultivation, compost-making and the like, depending upon the local situation.

Training could be organised in agro-machinery repairing, tubewell construction and maintenance, and other such activities. Finance could be organised from banks through the self-help group route.

Simultaneously, common facilities for input supply and marketing of the produce could be created to ensure the success of these ventures. All this would lead to the generation of self-employment opportunities on a sustainable basis.

At present, watershed development schemes are being financially supported by four ministries with aims varying from employment generation to natural resource conservation. These are the ministries of rural development, agriculture, water resources and forests and environment.

The problem is that while the rural development ministry has the most funds, the bulk of the land belongs to the forests and environment ministry or local bodies like panchayats and state agencies. But the expertise is available only with the agriculture ministry.

This aside, each ministry has laid down different norms for the use of funds and carrying out the actual work, creating problems for the implementing agencies. There is also the issue of how to route the funds for these programmes.

At present, the money goes to the district-level agencies, including district rural development agencies, through state governments. This offers scope for mis-direction of funds by the state governments as well as the district civic authorities.

In any case, the civic administration has experience only of carrying out civic works and not technical job like watershed and wasteland development.

Thus, there is need for synchronisation of guidelines for these projects. Also needed is a shift from the present, top-down approach to development planning to the desired bottom-up, decentralised planning and implementation.

The best course is to facilitate the creation of local stake-holders bodies and providing them expertise and other relevant assistance to take up the watershed and employment creation programmes.

These bodies will have to be ensured land-use rights for a period of at least 30 to 40 years. These policy issues need to get as much priority as enactment of legislation for guaranteed employment through food-for-work type of programmes.