Madhya Pradesh: the journey concludes

Ghelhar Choti, Jhabua

Watershed activities taken under the Madhya Pradesh government’s Rajiv Gandhi Watershed Development Mission saw this village sailing through the drought of 2000. "Rise in water table after watershed activities was enough for us to combat the drought situation. But this year the situation is totally different. We don’t have water and fodder as monsoon failed successively for the third year," says Ditiya Singh, president of the village watershed committee. Technically the watershed mission has withdrawn from this village and now it is the turn of the watershed committee to manage it.

Residents feel that the situation would have been better if the government had continued its watershed programme for a few more years. "Only in the last three years the village was noticing an improvement in agriculture after water availability. Besides government jobs kept people in the village during the lean period," says Singh. In October 1999 government stopped its watershed activities due to paucity of funds. As employment opportunities reduced considerably, and that also in a drought year, people started migrating. This contributed towards virtual collapse of the village level institutions created under the mission programme. "The time frame of four years is very limited as it takes at least two years to mobilise people for the programme. And in just two years results are difficult to see," says R K Gupta, additional chief executive officer of the district council.

For a village that tripled its irrigation potential in just three years, two consecutive droughts have reversed the wheel of change. "Ideally, in a drought year we should not withdraw from villages which have just finished four years under the watershed development programme. But given the guidelines and the target set up, we have to move out to other places," says Gupta.

Such cases do indicate that in order to make rural areas self-sustainable with regard to water availability, a sustained effort for a longer duration is required.

According to Anil Agarwal, Chairperson, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based NGO, "There is no village in India which cannot meet its basic cooking and drinking needs through rainwater harvesting. It does not matter how much rain you get, if you don’t capture it you can still be short of water." Given the fact that India is one of the most well-endowed nations in the world in terms of average rainfall, there is no reason why it should suffer from drought. This year or any other year. The most important lesson we have to learn from the current crisis is how to drought-proof the nation in the years to come — a task that can easily be accomplished in less than a decade if the country puts its mind to it. As the above-mentioned examples have already show, community-based rainwater harvesting — the paradigm of the past — has in it as much strength today as it ever did before.

A rejuvenated landscape: sustained water harvesting can scare away drought, forever