An approach to sustainable watershed development and management

The paper examines same of the past failures and successes of watershed projects in India and sugests a participatory approach is highly desirable for sustanable watershed development and management. Major factors leading to project failures can be ascribed to a top down approach with little farmer involvemnt bought by free or highly subsidized inputs, leading to a collapse of the project once funding ended; lack of experise and experience of implementing new NGOs, or other agencies: incomplete and poor quality of base-line data resulting in poorly designed and managed programs: coordination problems among the many stackeholders typical of the multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary approach required, rigid work planning guidelines of funding agencies ignoring variabile watershed characteristics and community requirements; too much emphasis on "give aways" smothering local interest by not building upon local skills, single technical objective approach e.g. addressing land productivity and reducing soil erosion; hurried formation of farmer groups who were not sufficiently aware of projects purpose. Several integrated watershed projects in India have been quite successful and have substantially contributed to uplifing the community, socially, economically and ecologically. Some of the sailent points common to succsessful watersheds include: presence of a good leader respected in the community: emphasis on water harvesting and groundwater recharge to increase water availability for agricultural and other purposes: applying the principle of cost sharing between farmer and implementing agencies; and proportional sharing of benefits and liabilities by the community except the initial investment. Clearly, the top-down approch has not produced the desired results. However, after seven years of the much landed participatory approach in Asia there is no solid evidence yet of major successes. Some of the concerns voiced and remedies proposed include: a much more community-centered process approach to problem idenfification, organization building, planning, implementation and managing funds to ahieve empowerment and self-reliance of farmers.