The Way Ahead: Learning From Experience

During the 1980s several successful community-based resource management experiences emerged as a response to the crisis in water management.The following examples described below provides us with valuable lessons.

Sukhomajri Village

Sukhomajri, located near the city of Chandigarh, is the first village in India to have income tax levied on the income it earns from the ecological regeneration of its degraded watershed. In 1979 when the nation was facing a severe drought, the villagers built small tanks to capture rainwater and agreed to protect their watershed in order to ensure that their tanks did not get silted up (Agarwal and Narain, 1980). The main incentive for the villagers to protect their watershed came because of an assurance from the forest department that they would have the right to the use of the forest land. The villagers argued that as they were protecting the watershed, they should get the benefits from the increased biomass production. The state forest department agreed to give the grass rights to the village as long as the villagers paid the forest department a royalty equivalent to the average income earned by the department before the villagers started protecting the watershed.

The combination of public, private and community investments and the participatory efforts of the villagers has produced, according to one cost benefit analysis, a rate of return of the order of 19 per cent (Chopra et al., 1990). The tanks have helped to increase crop production nearly threefold and the protection of the forest area has greatly increased grass and tree fodder availability. This, in turn, has increased milk production. With growing prosperity, Sukhomajri’s economy has undergone a change.“Who could imagine that televisions, tractors and bicycles could be had for mere grass and water?” asks a villager. One of the most impressive savings resulting from the project is in the cost of desilting the Sukhna lake which supplies water to the downstream city of Chandigarh. The inflow of sediment has come down by over 90 per cent.This saves the government Rs. 7.65 million ($0.2 million) each year in dredging and other costs .