CFTs in Maharashtra

Required to be run by the government and be embedded in the local community, Cluster Facilitation Teams need to provide the necessary impetus to generate demand, to create the right type of infrastructure for the people and the area, and to strengthen gram panchayats to take decisions for their communities

“Maharashtra has 40 per cent of the country’s large dams and, yet, 82 per cent of the area of the state is rain-fed. We have moved away from our vision of watershed and conservation…We did not think about hydrology, geology and topography of the region before pushing large dams everywhere. But this has to change.” These are not the words of an activist or a water researcher. This was said by Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, during the monsoon Assembly session of Maharashtra on 21 July 2015.

MGNREGA assumes significance in this context in a state where 79 per cent of the farmers have less than 2 ha of land and this constitutes 45 per cent of the total cultivable area. (Agri Census 2011).

Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data show that there are 35.26 per cent of landless households in the state. Almost 40 per cent of those that do have land do not have any kind of irrigation facility. Maharashtra has the lowest casual wages at Rs117.36; MGNREGA wages are Rs 181.00 (The Rural Wage Boom, Livemint). If this is the scenario in all of Maharashtra, one can understand that the figures for the Cluster Facilitation Team (CFT) blocks will be all the more dismal because the criterion for choosing these blocks ‘backwardness’.