Watershed Development in Maharashtra: Present Scenario and Issues for Restructuring the Programme Abraham Samuel, K. J. Joy, Suhas Paranjape, Sowjanya Peddi, Raju Adagale, Prafull Deshpande and Seema Kulkarni Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune Forum for Watershed Research and Policy Dialogue 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. The Context 1.2 The Review State 1.3 Methodology 1.4 Normative Framework of Review 1.4.1 Livelihoods 1.4.2 Sustainability and Equitable Access 1.4.3 Participation and Democratic Governance 1.5 Comparison of Different Guidelines 1.6 Structure of the Report Chapter 2: Watershed Development in Maharashtra: Macro Scenario 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Maharashtra: Agro-climatic Profile 2.2.1 Region-specific Problems 2.2.2 Land Utilization in Maharashtra 2.2.3 Irrigation and Drought 2.2.4 Water Resources 2.3 Agricultural Productivity 2.4 Watersheds in Maharashtra 2.5 History and Evolution of Watershed Programmes in Maharashtra 2.6. Brief Description of the Important Programmes 2.6.1 Centrally-assisted Schemes 2.6.2 State-supported Schemes 2.7. Maharashtra: The Overall Scenario Chapter 3: Impacts of Watershed Development on Ecosystems and Livelihoods 3.1 Context 3.2 Impacts on the Ecosystem 3.2.1 Improvement in soil quality 3.2.2 Change in soil erosion/runoff 3.2.3 Change in Life of Wells and Streams; Rise in Water-level and Number of Wells 2 3.2.4 Change in Green Cover, Biomass, Fodder and Fuel Availability 3.3 Intermediary impacts 3.3.1 Increase in drinking water 3.3.2 Changes in livestock numbers and composition 3.4 Impact on Agriculture 3.4.1 Change in land-use pattern 3.4.2 Increase in Yield 3.4.4 Change in cropping pattern 3.5. Increase in irrigated area 3.6 Methods of production 3.7 Socio-economic Indicators 3.7.1 Increase in income 3.7.2 Changes in employment and migration 3.8 Other social changes 3.9 Viability of the Projects 3.10 Watershed Development and Livelihoods Chapter 4: Watershed Development and Sustainability 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Sustainability of Assets Created under Watershed Development 4.3 Sustainability of Watershed Impacts 4.3.1 Land-use Change and Sustainability 4.3.2 Increase in Irrigation and its Impacts 4.3.3 Sustaining Agricultural Productivity 4.4 Sustainability of Institutions and Social Processes 4.5 Conclusion Chapter 5: Watershed Development: Equity and Gender 5.1 Context 5.2 Watershed Development: Existing Inequities 5.3 Addressing the Issue of Equity 5.3.1 Operationalizing Equity through Design/Strategy and Implementation 5.4 Gender issues in Watershed Development 5.4.1. Operationalizing gender in watershed policy and practice 5.4.2. Division of work and responsibility 5.4.3 Property rights 5.4.4 Institutions 5.4.5 Ecology 5.5. Conclusion 3 Chapter 6: Watershed Development: Processes and Participation 6.1 Context 6. 2. Participation in Watershed Guidelines 6.3 Implementing Participation: Watershed Processes and Practice 6.3.1 Watershed selection and initial mobilization 6.3.2 Village-level institutions/community based organizations 6.3.3 Other organizations 6.3.4 Participation in Planning, Design and Technology Choice 6.3.5 Process of Implementation, Local contribution/Cost sharing and Participation 6.3.6 Capacity building for Participation 6.3.7 Participation in Monitoring and Evaluation. 6.3.8 Financial Transaction, Issues of Transparency and Participation 6.4. Watershed Development and Panchayat Raj Institutions 6.5. Observations Chapter 7 : Issues, Concerns and Research Needs 7.1 Change in Approach and Strategy 7.1.1 Project Planning 7.1.2 Watershed Development Unit 7.1.3 Project Implementation and Community Participation 7.1.4 Conservation and Production Technology 7.1.5 Common Property Land Resources 7.1.6 Equity 7.1.7 Operation and Management of Assets 7.1.8 Management of Groundwater 7.1.9 Project Management 7.1.10 Baseline/ Benchmarking 7.2 Some Strategies for Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Watershed Development 7.3 Research Needs 7.4 Reorienting the Watershed Programme List of Abbreviations List of Tables List of Figures 4 Executive Summary The concept of integrated and participatory watershed development and management has emerged as the cornerstone of rural development in the dry and semi-arid regions of India. Over the years the country has been making increasing investments in this area with the objective of enhancing the production potential of rainfed agriculture. Even more ambitious plans have been made for the futurethe government has set a target of Rs.76,000 crores for the next 25 years. In all likelihood the dry lands of India, hitherto neglected from the mainstream development process, would receive added attention in the years to come if we have to go by the recent pronouncements by the central government. The National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government states that, the UPA government will introduce a special programme for dryland farming in the arid and the semi-arid regions of the country. Watershed and wasteland development programmes will be taken up on a massive scale . all existing schemes for drought-prone area development will be reviewed and a single major national programme will be launched. The Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has announced the governments intention of setting up a Rainfed Areas Authority. Thus we can say that a new generation of watershed based development projects are going to be launched in the country. At the same time there are mixed feelings about watershed development programmes and what they have achieved. While many now consider them to be the linchpin of rural development in dryland areas one that integrates sectors and provides the foundation for subsequent development there are growing murmurs about the effectiveness of watershed development and a feeling that they are falling far short of their promise. In fact the Hariyali guidelines, came into effect in 2003, are already under review by the Technical Committee on Watershed Programmes in India (Parthasarathy Committee) appointed by the Ministry of Rural Development and a new set of guidelines for watershed development projects is expected to come into existence. As we enter this new generation of watershed-based development programmes with such heightened targets and expectations, it is important to ensure that the experiences from the first generation of widely implemented watershed development are fully understood and internalised. It is important that the practitioners, researchers, policy makers, implementers and funders come together and initiate a discussion on how best watershed development can achieve its potential and become an important instrument of bringing about a sustainable and equitable process of participative development in the rural areas. The present review of watershed projects in Maharashtra, undertaken by Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), on behalf of the Forum for Watershed Research and Policy Dialogue (ForWaRD), hopes to contribute to this process. It may be noted at the outset that the present review of watershed programmers in Maharashtra is not an attempt to evaluate nor assess the impact of the large number of watershed projects that have been implemented in the state. Rather, this is more or less an exercise in stock taking and learning from the past. Even though the review makes an attempt to provide a birds eye view of achievements of watershed projects in the state, the focus is on situating the programme in the context of the larger developmental objective of sustainable and equitable livelihoods in rainfed areas. In this larger context, the stock taking exercise has been carried out with a difference where the status of watershed development is being examined through the lens of a normative framework that lays special emphasis on productivity and livelihoods, equity, sustainability, and participation/democratic decentralization. The present review of watershed development programmes in Maharashtra is also an effort to build on the earlier effort by Joy et al in 2003-04 (Watershed review: Issues and prospects brought out by CISED as Technical Review in 2004) which reviewed the watershed programmes in the dry land regions with a focus on Karnataka and Maharashtra. The review is based mainly on the existing sources of information (studies, reviews, reports, data available with different state departments etc.), which in fact, are quite scanty. There is also a serious problem of availability of such information in the public domain, besides inconsistency in information/data on issues related to the spread/coverage and physical and financial progress of projects. Nevertheless, we have tried to overcome the constraints in qualitative information, at least partly, by holding detailed discussions with a large number of key informants and also by visiting a few sites of selected 5 watershed projects. 1.1. Watershed Development in Maharashtra Watershed development has a long history in Maharashtra. In Bhandara age old tanks, some around 500 years old, exist and are managed today which support a much superior cropping pattern there than in the rest of the state. Traditional water harvesting and diversion structures for purposes of artificial irrigation have been excavated in Central Maharashtra (Ahmednagar, Dhule and Pune) estimated to date around 1500- 1200 B.C. Social reformers and public intellectuals of the state have exhorted the importance water conservation since centuries. With the Abolition of Proprietary Rights Act (APRA) enacted in 1950, rights over tanks was transferred from themalguzars and local village communities to the irrigation department and the zilla parishads which were not equipped to address the maintenance and repair problems of these tanks adequately. Subsequently, during the British and postindependence period, major emphasis was on construction of large reservoirs and dams. Maharashtra has a large drought prone area (52%) and has faced recurrent droughts and famines (1907, 1911, 1918, 1920,1972 etc.), which generated attention on the improvement of agriculture in non-irrigated areas.