An Effort to Make Water Everybody’s Business

Introducing the 5% model and constructing happas in the drought-prone, arid uplands and midlands of molian panchayat in Bankura district has transformed barren tracts into verdant and productive lands, thereby benefiting and empowering the resource-poor occupants of the area.

PRADAN and MGNREGA

P radan has been working in West Bengal since 1986 and, more specifically, in Bankura district since 2005. PRADAN’s focus has been on Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM) for sustainable livelihoods promotion. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has created umpteen opportunities for INRM by ensuring technical and financial support for an array of bio-physical activities. By guaranteeing every rural household 100 days of work a year, MGNREGA has made it possible to droughtproof landscapes and create durable livelihood assets on a massive scale. MGNREGA envisages that plans for village development will be prepared in the highly desirable bottom-up manner, with the panchayat playing a crucial role in both planning and implementation. Despite the good intentions, however, the works are largely instigated by a few influential persons at the block level and the rural poor are seldom consulted in the process. Such an approach hardly makes for any change.

In most parts of Bankura district, which is rainfed and dry, the food sufficiency of small and marginal farmers suffers greatly due to lack of assured irrigation for kharif paddy. NREGA funds are available but, as mentioned earlier, the challenge remains in how they can be leveraged and plied through institutional arrangements, and most of all how such arrangements can be fine-tuned to address the real needs of the people. Another pertinent challenge lies in cohering the long-standing knowledge and understanding of village communities with the technical and specialized inputs that facilitating agencies are attempting to bring to the fore.

This article looks at PRADAN’s accomplishment in saturating a smaller sub-watershed that cuts across three village habitations of the Molian panchayat with water harvesting structures. The precise manner in which the intervention was customized to meet the needs of resource-poor farmers, the way in which NREGA funds were efficiently tapped into, and the SHGs were center-staged to ensure a bottom-up process of planning-cum-implementation are highlighted.