Residents of Chitakhera village in Ajmer district of Rajasthan state are no longer fearful that the rains might fail. The pattern of rainfall has not changed in this semi-arid region - and rains continue to fail every two years out of five - but grain bins in villagers’ houses are full of supplies that can last two years and more, lofts are overflowing with stored fodder, and water level in wells has risen by forty feet on average since soil and moisture treatments were commenced eight years ago.
Fodder is grown on plots of common land and harvested annually by villagers who have to pay their User Committee a small fee for every bundle of grass and shrubs that they collect. These fees are utilized to pay for the salaries of village watchmen, who guard the pastures against invasions by stray cattle. Plentiful water is available for cattle and sheep, and the village committee charges a nominal fee for every animal that drinks at the communal trough. These fees are used, once again, for the purposes of maintenance and upkeep.
Chitakhera is hardly alone in this respect. More than eight hundred villages in Rajasthan have formed similar User Committees and they have joined hands with a government department to implement a statewide programme of integrated watershed development. Several among these villages have achieved selfsufficiency insofar as food, fodder and fuelwood supplies are concerned, and many have surplus stocks that they provide to other villages in their vicinity, especially when the rains fail.
Each of these villages is provided with financial and technical support by the state governments’ Department of Watershed Development. Villagers must manage the programme for the most part through the User Committees they elect, and they also contribute labour and local raw materials amounting to about twenty percent of the total cost of the programme.
Though it was a fairly new programme when it was launched in 1990, watershed development responded to some principal concerns that are widely shared among the 35 million persons who live in villages in Rajasthan. Agriculture is the major occupation of 94 percent of village dwellers, but agriculture is characterized in this state by low yields and frequent crop failure. Cattle, sheep and goats are kept in large numbers by farmers to insure against the uncertainties that surround crop production in this drought-prone region. These animals are mostly range-fed, foraging on grasses and shrubs that grow on village common lands. The production of fodder on these common lands is thus of critical importance.
As human population has increased by more than two percent a year, and cattle population, already three times the population of humans, has grown even faster, village common lands have come under intense pressure. Area in common pastures has fallen as more land was given over to crop production, and fertility 70 has dropped on account of overuse. Reduced area and diminished fertility on common lands have combined to create a situation where fodder and fuelwood are in permanent short supply. Drought only aggravates the situation further. Fodder supplies fall nearly to zero, water is scarce, and people are forced to leave the village along with their herds.
It was with the intention of dealing with this situation and developing means to cope with it on a sustainable basis that a programme of integrated watershed development was launched by the government of Rajasthan state, supported financially by the World Bank and the Indian Ministry of Agriculture. A specialized Department of Watershed Development (DWD) was created by the state government, which drew its staff from multiple disciplines, including agronomy and crop science, soil and water conservation, forestry, and animal husbandry.
An integrated menu of technology options was developed by these staff that would enable productivity increases to be achieved over a wide front and in a manner that could be sustained by villagers acting on their own behalf. New crops and improved agronomic methods were introduced along with low-cost soil and water conservation techniques and forestry and pasture management practices. Villagers have co-managed all of these activities right from the start, acquiring expertise and confidence and developing an organizational basis for dealing as well with other development tasks.
User Committees (UCs) have been elected by villagers, consisting of between four and seven persons in each village, who are responsible for managing programme activities on behalf of the village community. Election to UCs has been mostly by consensus and nearly all villagers, especially those who are more in need of fodder and fuelwood, which includes most poorer villagers, have participated in these elections. Fresh elections to the UC are held every year, and all accounts have to be presented openly in monthly village meetings.
UCs provide villagers with a forum for discussing problems related to watershed development and they serve also as a management committee for resolving these problems. These committees are principally responsible for planning and managing activities on village common lands that constitute between a half to two-thirds of all village lands and which serve as the source of most of the fodder and nearly all of the fuelwood required in the village. Some better-trained UCs took on additional tasks, including constructing small dams and anicuts, and undertaking soil and moisture conservation treatments on privately owned lands. They are assisted in these tasks by local paraprofessionals, village residents who were selected by UCs and provided with technical training by DWD staff.
Collectively and individually, villagers are also responsible for providing a share of programme funds. The local share was ten percent when watershed development was first taken up at the start and it is twenty percent among villages that have joined the programme later. Villagers pay their shares not in cash but mostly by providing labour, so poorer villagers can and have participated equally.
These organizational innovations have been accompanied by some fairly significant technical innovations. DWD staff working in cooperation with paraprofessionals and other villagers have developed low-cost techniques that are simple to learn and which rely mostly on materials that are easily and cheaply available to villagers. Vegetative materials are preferred for soil and moisture conservation structures, for instance, and these are available abundantly in the wild or they are raised in village nurseries. Since the required materials are available locally, and since villagers have learned to work with these materials, maintaining and extending these structures do not pose any large problem for them.
Training has formed a large part of the programme. Members of UCs, paraprofessionals and nursery raisers were trained in technical aspects by DWD staff and also by specialized trainers from universities and NGOs. Other villagers were trained as primary health care providers for treating cattle and other farm animals.
Activities commenced by the programme have been mostly well maintained by the villagers. Three-year survival rates of trees in a sample of 17 village common lands ranged from a high of 89 percent to a low of 56 percent. Fodder yields in the same villages remain between three and ten times higher than what they were before programme implementation began, which is a commendable performance, especially for these high moisture-stress conditions (CTAE 1999). Many nursery raisers and most animal health care providers are continuing to provide their services for a fee to other villagers five years after programme support has been withdrawn from these villages.
User Committees continue to function in many programme villages, maintaining the activities that were taken up earlier and also helping their fellow villagers for taking up new collective endeavors. In Nauwa village of Udaipur district, for example, universal female literacy is a new goal that villagers have set themselves and which they are implementing with the help of their UC. The Committee in Sangawas village of Rajsamand district has organized a savings group in which many villagers have become members. In Andheri Deori, in Ajmer district, poultry and rabbit rearing activities have been organized among villagers by their UC. Local organizations built up in the course of programme implementation are proving useful to villagers for taking up other development activities.
Not all villages participating in the watershed development programme have been equally successful. In spite of having the same policy environment, a virtually equal level of programme funding, and similar agro-ecological conditions, some villages have performed quite poorly in the programme whereas others, such as Chitakhera, Sangawas, Nauwa and Andheri Deori, have performed much better. Apart from the attitudes and behaviors of DWD staff, features of village-level social organization have also been found to account for these differences.
DWD staff behaviours account for some part of the observed differences among participating villages. Forming effective User Committees and forging effective partnerships between these Committees and DWD staff was necessarily a step-by- 72 step process. Villagers needed to first come together to discuss the situation and arrive at a common definition of the problem. They would then elect a UC and agree on a plan of action, after which implementation would begin. It was important that villagers had the time to develop clear understandings and form binding agreements with the consent of all. Such things cannot be rushed along; they can only evolve relatively slowly, when all have had a chance to participate and have their say. Some department staffs were impatient with what to them seemed like interminable rounds of fruitless discussions. Artificially speeding up the pace of implementation came at a great cost, however, resulting in weak village committees that later proved incapable of gaining the commitments required for sustaining programme benefits.
Aspects related to social organization in the village also help explain differences among villages in programme performance, that is, in fodder, fuel and grain production and adoption of soil and water conservation techniques. Differences in programme performance for a sample of 64 participating villages are found to be significantly related to differences in villages’ stocks of social capital (Krishna and Uphoff 1999). High-performing villages are the ones that have higher stocks of social capital, while low-performing villages have comparatively lower stocks.
The stock of social capital has two components according to this analysis: its structural component derives from the strength of informal social networks in these villages, and its cognitive component consists of attitudes, values and beliefs that affect trust, reciprocity and solidarity among villagers. The level of social capital in any village is related also to the number of information sources that villagers consult, to the availability of mechanisms for resolving conflicts locally, and to villagers' prior experience of collective action. Social capital is found in this analysis to be not significantly related to heterogeneity and social stratification in the village. Modernization, measured in terms of mechanization, commercialization and infrastructure development, also has no bearing on the stock of social capital available with any village.
Levels of social capital can be enhanced, this analysis shows, through programmes that promote information-sharing among villagers, for instance by educating them about citizens’ rights and programme opportunities, and also by those which assist villagers to develop a collective response. Programmes such as watershed development, which assist villagers to act collectively through the medium of locally elected User Committees, can help enhance villagers’ stocks of social capital.
Policy environment in the Rajasthan case was generally supportive of villagers’ efforts. Policy makers were mostly convinced that a programme such as this was long overdue and that it would help resolve some of the most important problems that had been faced by villagers for generations. A State-level Coordination Committee was set up to provide apex-level policy support to the Department of Watershed Development. This Coordination Committee, composed of senior officials from all concerned government departments and also experienced NGO persons, proved very useful, especially in the initial stages of programme implementation.
Since the programme was implemented by multi-disciplinary staff drawn from many different government departments it was important to have such inter-departmental agreements at the start. Departmental rivalries could easily have developed in the absence of such agreements, compromising the integrated nature of work in the field. It was equally important to gain policy support for the innovations that were introduced in terms of implementation methods. Working alongside User Committees and passing large amounts of public funds over to these non-statutory bodies was a considerable departure from past practice. New financial rules had to be drafted and new accounting procedures approved. These and other innovations in methods and practices were approved relatively quickly because discussion among senior policymakers was facilitated by the State-level Coordination Committee.
Three sets of agencies were involved in operating the Rajasthan Watershed Development Programme. Policy-level support laid the groundwork for success, but field staff were needed to carry the message. Programme success depended additionally on organizational efforts by participating villagers. Any weak link in this chain could have the effect of jeopardizing programme results. In addition to having policy support, thus, it was necessary to motivate field staff and to help villagers build local organizations that can assist with implementation and that can sustain these efforts even after programme funding has ended.
Motivating field staff is not automatic or easy, especially in a government agency where promotions and other marks of recognition are regulated by fairly rigid civil service rules. Innovative methods were developed in the Rajasthan case that helped to keep department staff highly motivated and committed to developing effective solutions for the problems they encountered in the field. Considerable authority was delegated to field-level personnel. They were encouraged to be innovative and experimental. No penalties were imposed for experiments that failed despite good intentions and sufficient care; successful innovations were published in a monthly newsletter; and a system of departmental awards was instituted to reward innovators. Teamwork was encouraged and staff were deployed in multi-disciplinary teams that were jointly responsible for a group of adjoining watershed locations. Narrow disciplinary barriers were breached in this way, and team members developed a sense of ownership for the watersheds in their jurisdiction.
Helping villagers to build an appropriate local organization proved to be another crucial task of watershed development. As the analysis by Krishna and Uphoff (1999) indicates, villages that achieved significant improvements in fodder, fuel and grain production were usually also the ones that had higher levels of social capital. High social capital villages were able to form effective User Committees with relative ease. Other villages that started with lower levels of social capital were given additional support by DWD staff. Learning visits were organized so they could interact with other villagers where more effective UCs had begun to show visible results. Village meetings were called regularly where DWD staff facilitated discussions of the costs and benefits that could be expected from participating in programme activities. In these and in other ways it was demonstrated to villagers that they could achieve considerable benefits if they organized themselves effectively. Social capital has been built up in the process as residents of these villages have started to work collaboratively among themselves. Residents in many programme villages have taken up other collaborative ventures on their own initiative.
References
CTAE. 1999. Final Evaluation Study of Integrated Watershed Development Project in Rajasthan. Udaipur, Rajasthan: College of Technology and Agricultural Engineering.
Krishna, Anirudh. 1997. Participatory Watershed Development and Soil Conservation in Rajasthan, India. In Reasons For Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development, Anirudh Krishna, Norman Uphoff and Milton J. Esman, eds. West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press.
Krishna, Anirudh and Norman T. Uphoff. 1999. Mapping and Measuring Social Capital: A Conceptual and Empirical Study of Collective Action for Conserving and Developing Watersheds in Rajasthan, India. Social Capital Initiative Working Paper #13, Social Development Department. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.
