Participation and Integration in Watershed Management Strategy In GOI and GOK Programmes

1. Introduction

1. How “people’s participation” came to be introduced as a critical component in watershed management strategy in Karnataka.
2. How “people’s participation” came to be introduced as a critical component in watershed management strategy in watershed programmes sponsored centrally by Ministries at the Government of India level.

This paper is meant for use primarily as a resource document for extracting training content for use in training programmes related to watershed management. The opinions and conclusions of the writer are debatable.

2. People’s Participation in Watershed Programmes in Karnataka:

It is useful to go back in history and to enquire how people’s participation was introduced as a critical component in watershed management strategy in Karnataka. The tangible evidence suggests that the major initiative to include participation in rural development programmes in Karnataka took off in the mid-eighties when there was both political as well as bureaucratic support to involve the Panchayat Raj Institutions in development programmes. The political and policy framework for introducing people’s participation in development was the introduction of the Panchayat Raj Bill in 1983, which was approved by the President in 1986 and passed as an Act in Karnataka in 1987. The process of involving the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) during the four intervening years (1983-1987) continued, under the momentum generated by the policy of the political party in power and with the active support of Shri P.R.Nayak as Development Commissioner and Shri Meenakshisundaram as Secretary, Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department. These two officers reasoned that involving people in development is part of a broader “political” strategy to build up and involve the PRIs.

The first development programme in which the PRIs were formally involved was the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP). The participation of people, however, was seen mainly as the involvement of the Panchayat institutions. When the Dryland Development Boards were constituted which were also responsible for implementing the watershed programmes, they were also situated in the context of the Panchayat Raj, but only at the District level. The original concept of the Dry Land Development Board (DLDB) bears this out. It was envisioned to be a people’s committee. This is mainly why it had an elected representative as its chair. However, in practice, it was largely managed by the administration at the District level. There was not much thought given to people’s institutions at the Gram Panchayat level or below, namely at the watershed level. As far as the Government was concerned, therefore, participation in watershed management was introduced in the context of the Panchayat Raj Act which gave responsibility to the PRIs, in this case particularly to the Zilla Panchayats at the District level. It must also be pointed out that the programmes managed by the DLDB were actually implemented through officials drawn from the Line departments. Therefore while the objective of integrating various sectors – like forestry, agriculture, soil and water conservation, agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry – was partially achieved by bringing all the technical staff supporting these sectors under the DLDB, their attitudes and the systems they subscribed to remained firmly entrenched in their respective departments; it must be said that these attitudes and systems did not promote participation of people at the watershed level or foster the process and institutions required to foster people’s effective participation in identifying, planning, budgeting, implementing and managing watersheds. The two Officers mentioned above were aware of this and decided that a pilot project involving NGOs who would be directly responsible for community organisation while the DLDB implemented the technical and infrastructural aspects would help to introduce people’s participation more effectively in watershed management strategy.

Myrada’s watershed management project in Gulbarga, called Participative Integrated Development of watersheds (PIDOW) was launched in 1985 when the Development Commissioner and the Secretary Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department were already promoting the participation of the Panchayat institutions in RLEGP. Gulbarga was not implemented by Myrada only. There were three co-operating organisations: 1) The Government of Karnataka – during the first two years through the Line Departments, then for a year and a half through the Zilla Panchayat and finally through the Dry Land Development Board, 2) the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation which provided the funds, and 3) Myrada.

In order to institutionalise this three-way partnership, a Joint Project Committee was constituted with the Secretary RD&PR, (Government of Karnataka) as Chairperson. The Government was responsible for the technical support and physical implementation, while Myrada was responsible for community organisation. Myrada’s organisational objective was to promote people’s institutions appropriate to manage watersheds and to support them to become the fourth (and hopefully leading) partner. “Participation” was clearly enshrined in “PIDOW” as the name itself indicates. This was four years before Participatory Rural Appraisal appeared on the development scenario in India.

As far as involvement of an NGO was concerned, as mentioned above, the Development Commissioner and Secretary Government of India, Government of India also decided that it may be useful to experiment with the involvement of recognised and experienced NGOs as another incarnation of “people’s institutions” apart from the Zilla Panchayat. This, they reasoned, would provide a framework to assess whether NGOs would be more effective than the regular line Departments in promoting participation especially of the poor in decisions related to watershed activities. This explains to a large extent why Myrada was accepted by the Government of India as a partner in the Gulbarga Project. There was, at that time some opposition from concerned Departments in Delhi to the formal involvement of an NGO in a bilateral project. It was Shri Bandhopadhyay (Secretary, Rural Development, Government of India) who supported the formal involvement of NGOs as a pilot experiment.

1.Integration of Interventions & Participation of People

Several sectors and departments are involved in an integrated watershed programme – prominent among these are Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Soil and water Conservation. This pressure to integrate these interventions as a first step came mainly from Government of Karnataka in the context of the Panchayat Raj framework since one of the major objectives of the Panchayat Raj strategy was to integrate all activities of the Line Departments through the Zilla Panchayat. Major bilateral/multilateral donors built on this initiative. The second World Bank supported Karnataka Watershed project was being formulated in the mid 1980s, during the same period that the Panchayat Raj policy was being formalised.

Integration of interventions was part of the World Bank discourse in the 1970s and 80s. During the 1980s, “integration” of interventions was accepted in the World Bank discourse as critical to effectiveness. In Karnataka the Bank found that the Government had taken a step towards integrating technical support in the RLEGP Programme. A Multi Disciplinary Team (MDT) had been introduced in Karnataka which provided technical support to the RLEGP. The Bank sponsored Watershed Project built on this initiative since observation indicated that the MDTs had been comparatively more effective. This initiative supporting integration, therefore, was in line with the current thinking of both the Bank and the Government of Karnataka. This initiative of introducing a MDT to provide technical support was also picked by the Hanumantha Rao Committee; it found expression in the Watershed Guidelines of the Ministry of Rural Development (Government of India) of 1995 which provided for Inter Disciplinary Watershed Development Teams staffed by officers with backgrounds in agriculture, soil engineering, forestry and community organisation. It must be noted that Participation of people and their institutions did not figure in Bank discourse in a significant way till the early 1990s; it was “integration of interventions” that took central place. “Integration” had a head start since both Government and Multilateral/Bilateral Agencies considered the integration of interventions as a more tangible and achievable objective than participation.

The Government of Karnataka’s initiative to integrate intervention through the MDTs in the RLEGP took a step forward with the constitution of the Dry Land Development Boards (DLDB) which had both technical staff and people’s representatives at the Zilla Panchayat level. These Boards placed the Technical Team in the context of the “people’s institutions” namely the Panchayat Raj where people’s participation was officially enshrined. The Chairperson of the DLDB was an elected representative. The DLDBs therefore sought to bring together and to provide an institutional basis for the intervenors who were mainly technical staff and the representatives of people.

Apart from the integrated technical support structure (the MDTs), the RLEGP programme itself was conceived and presented in an integrated manner in Karnataka. During this period (1986 – 89) the RD&PR, Government of India, seems to have had difficulty in getting the Government of India to accept its initiative to adopt an integrated approach in its RLEGP programme. The practice at the Government of India level still required each component to be approved of and funded by the relevant Ministry. To cope with this situation, the Government of India had to un-bundle its proposals, which were prepared in an integrated manner and submit them to the relevant ministries for approval. Having obtained these approvals from various Ministries, the proposal was integrated once again at the State level. Integration of interventions, therefore, had still to be enshrined in an institution at the national level.

As far as participation of people was concerned, the Government of Karnataka viewed it only in the context of the PRIs in the 1980s and through most of the 1990s. There was no initiative to promote people’s institutions below the Zilla Panchayat till the late 1990s.The emergence of the Watershed Committee at the 500 ha level originated from centrally sponsored watershed programmes, initially from the Ministry of Rural Development and later from the Common Guidelines for watershed programmes. It was KAWAD (the Karnataka Watershed Development Society) a government sponsored Society which is managing a watershed programme in three districts (funded by DFID-UK) which was the first to introduce in 1999 the self help affinity groups in all watershed programmes as an institutional expression of people’s participation. The SHGs were also introduced in SUJALA, the watershed programme managed by the Government of Karnataka and supported by the World Bank which started in 2001. These SHGs focused on the marginalised and poorer sectors and trained people to manage their affairs and intervene in broader issues related to watershed management as well as to take up income generating activities. Another expression of people’s participation namely, the Watershed Management Associations or User Groups or Area groups emerged at the level of the micro watersheds covering 150-200 ha and have been introduced both in KAWAD programme as well as in SUJALA. However, these developments in institutionalising people’s participation below the Zilla Panchayat in Government sponsored watershed programmes took off only around 2000 and have been described in detail in several publications. Both these people’s institutions finally found a place in the revised guidelines called Hariyali (2003) from the Government of India. There was little effort in Karnataka in the late 198Os and 90s to build on the initial effort to involve people in watershed programmes through the Zilla Panchayats and to experiment with people’s institutions which were appropriate to manage and sustain watersheds.

Myrada – PIDOW, Gulbarga which started in 1985-86 was the first example in the country of a Bilateral project where a first step towards institutionalising participation outside the Zilla Panchayat was taken by the Government of Karnataka. It began by involving an NGO, Myrada who was responsible for community organisation. Myrada distinguished between people’s institutions which are representative like the Zilla Panchayat and Gram Panchayat and those which are participatory like the Gram Sabha, the SHGs (and later the Watershed management Associations). It held the position that both types of institutions are required as the basis of democracy partly to promote equity and partly to make participation more effective and sustainable. Between 1986 and 1992 Myrada promoted the SHGs as the basic institution in watersheds management. Alongside people decided that they prefer to work together to manage a micro watershed which covered between 150-200 ha in the area. These groups came to be known as Watershed Management Associations (WMAs) and comprised between 30 to 35 families who had a stake in the micro watershed. These WMAs are similar to the Area or User Groups that are given a place in Hariyali Guidelines. Unfortunately the PIDOW project ran into several problems related to collaboration at the Bilateral level with the result that interest in the programme on the part of Government of Karnataka declined; further Myrada was not able to devote sufficient resources to promote a process that would help the WMAs to move from implementing the watershed programme to managing and sustaining it.

As a result, the learnings from PIDOW were not absorbed into watershed strategy in Karnataka in the late 80s and early 90s; from this aspect. Participatory peoples institutions as a critical element in watershed strategy was not institutionalised in programmes sponsored by the Government of Karnataka until the late nineties when KAWAD and SUJALA were grounded. Surprisingly, the PIDOW experiment had a greater impact on national policy through the Ministry of Rural development in the early nineties than it had in Karnataka.

3.1. Beyond Integration Of Interventions To Participation Of People

One often finds that the concept of integration (where the interventions of various intervenors in watershed programmes are coordinated by or through one body like the DLDB) tends to get mixed up with the concept of participation (where people participate effectively at every stage in watershed management.

No doubt integration and participation are linked. Integration of interventions is necessary as a first step to make participation “friendly” to people, but it is not enough. Besides, and more significantly, for integration of interventions to be really effective, the interventions must integrate not only with each other but with people’s priorities and practices. Further, integration of interventions must be driven by people institutions which are participatory and in which every stakeholder is a member and not by an external agency even if is a representative one like the Zilla Panchayat.

Unfortunately, integration is often limited to officers from various departments visiting the field at the same time and drawing up watershed treatment plans together. This is already a step towards making it easier for people to participate – provided the time of the visit coincides with people’s availability in the village and not to the office hours of Government staff.

Integration however has to go much deeper to be really effective. Integration has to be achieved not only among the intervenors, but also between the intervenors programmes and systems (related to planning, budgeting and implementation) and the priorities and practices of people. In order for these priorities and practices to have an impact on the programme, they need to be backed by people’s institutions which are strong enough to ensure that the voice of people is respected. This in turn requires a comprehensive strategy to promote and institutionalise people’s participation through participatory institutions like SHGs and the Watershed Management Associations, (Area Groups/User Groups). Integration of interventions and participation of people need to be balanced in such a way that together they have an impact on the following activities in watershed management:

v       Planning – for example people opt to protect and regenerate private lands lying fallow where conflict is limited, rather than to protect and regenerate common lands where the potential for conflict is high; people opt to position gully plugs near fields of farmers who are willing to maintain them rather than where intervenors position these plugs.

v       Land treatment measures -for example people often have implemented some measures which they would prefer to be integrated in the measures which the intervenors propose, rather than destroyed when the new plan is implemented.

v       The integration of purposes –for example while the intervenors may want to construct bunds to reduce soil erosion, people may also want bunds for protection,

v       The integration of traditional methods used by people, with measures brought in by intervenors – for example people may prefer boulder bunds since their fields are full of boulders while intervenors opt for mud bunds since they measure work by the quantity of soil dug out.

However as a first step it was necessary to integrate the activities of intervenors so that all of them approach the people together; this, it was assumed, would help to remove over lapping of activities and better timing to conform with people’s schedules.

4. Participation of people as promoted by the Ministry of Rural Development, GOI

Given the important role that the Ministry of Rural development plays in the management and funding of Watershed Programmes, it will be useful to record how participation was introduced in watershed management at the level of the Government of India.

Interaction with Government officials who were the key players during 1992-96 and perusal of papers related to the work of the Hanumantha Rao Committee indicates that there was a general dissatisfaction with the performance of the DPAP and DDP since the 1980s at least. This was officially documented and confirmed by the report of a Committee set up b the Ministry of Rural Development which was published in 1989. In a way it put an official stamp on the general feeling of dissatisfaction. The report provided evidence that in spite of major programmes ¾ like the Soil Conservation in the catchments of River Valley Projects launched in 1962, the DPAP launched in 1972-73, the DDP in 1977-78, the Integrated Watershed Management Scheme for Flood Control in the Catchments of Flood prone rivers in 1992-93, ¾ there was overwhelming evidence that reservoirs were silting up, that there was no significant or sustainable impact on productivity or on the resilience of crops to long dry spells in drought prone areas and that floods were a recurring feature.

Shri B.N.Yugandhar, took over as Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development, GOI in 1992. The findings of the above mentioned report, were confirmed by his own experience and the evaluations of the DPAP/DDP programmes which he had initiated while in the Academy in Mussoorie. On the other hand visits to watershed programmes managed by NGOs showed that in general the quality of works was superior when compared to the works undertaken by the DPAP/DDP; in several cases, the unit costs were lower and the watershed structures were better maintained. He felt that the space for people’s participation provided in the NGO managed programmes and the transparency in funds management, which they encouraged, was primarily responsible for the better quality, lower costs and improved sustainability. The Eighth Plan in the context of meeting food requirements had asked for a regionally more broad based pattern of growth by devoting greater attention and resources to the development of rainfed tracts. This set the framework of quantitative and qualitative increase in resources directed to watershed management.

Why did Shri Yugandhar consider it critical to introduce people’s participation in watershed management? This was a “personal” query, which this writer took the liberty of asking him.

The first and major reason was his dissatisfaction with the performance of the DPAP/DDP programmes. This resulted from the feedback of several independent reports and the analysis of various studies of the DPAP/DDP programmes, some conducted during his stint at the Academy in Mussoorie. On the other hand studies conducted on the role that people’s institutions (particularly SAGs) played in the Integrated Tribal Development Project in Andhra Pradesh and the Women’s Empowerment Project in Tamilnadu both supported by IFAD and reports from Myrada Gulbarga’s experience strongly indicated that where people played an effective role, there was significant improvement in the transparency and accountability of cash utilisation, in the quality of work and in people’s skills and capacities to manage their lives and resources. Why could not participation of people in watershed development have a similar impact?

He considered it a priority to review the management and strategy of the DPAP/DDP which were major programmes of the Government of India that focussed on soil and water conservation and to introduce participation of people as a critical input in the process. One of the first steps he took was to constitute a committee chaired by Dr.Hanumantha Rao (a well-known economist and former Vice Chair of the Planning Commission); it was called the Technical Committee on Drought Prone Areas and Desert Development Programme; it came to be known as the Hanumantha Rao Committee. The name of its chairperson gave it both a high profile and a credibility that was acknowledged by leaders and policy makers at the highest levels. Among the committees terms of reference was the following: “To recommend measures intended to promote the role of watershed committees, Pani Panchayats, NGOs, etc., in order to encourage widespread participation of people and ensure greater accountability of funds and sectoral Departments to people’s representatives”.

4.1.  The Hanumantha Rao Committee: The Hanumantha Rao Committee’s Report recommended that the responsibility for planning and implementing DPAP and DDP should be transferred to the democratically constituted Local Self Government Institutions and to the voluntary organisations of the people. It is presumed that the democratically constituted institutions included those set up under the Panchayat Raj Act. The report also recommended that the support structure to foster participation should be a combination of Government Departments, NGOs and people’s institutions and not NGOs or Government alone. The report in several places linked participation with sustainability particularly related to the maintenance of structures. It states for example, “where people have been motivated to participate from inception … …the structures are protected by them”. In brief, the report recognised that there is a causal relationship between participation and sustainability, particularly of physical structures.

Myrada’s experience indicates that though participation is linked to sustainability, it is not adequate to build the basis for sustainability. There is a gap in the process. Participation needs to lead to the development and growth of people’s institutions appropriate to the task and/or resources to be managed and this in turn lays a more appropriate basis for sustainability. Further, the structure of people’s institutions required to take the lead in planning and implementing watershed activities is not necessarily the same as the structure of institutions appropriate for maintenance and sustainability. These insights emerged from the Myrada Gulbarga-PIDOW experience but were not followed through at that time.

The report did not intend to analyse the process leading from people’s participation to the emergence of people’s institutions appropriate to “manage” watersheds – where “manage” included people’s participation in a sustained manner through the process of identifying, planning, budgeting, implementing and maintaining the structures and systems required to sustain impact in the entire watershed.

There were some queries related to the report which were of concern. For example: How did the Hanumantha Rao Committee arrive at the recommendation that the appropriate supporting structure should be a combination of Government-NGOs and CBOs(Community Based Organisations). Surely not from the visits it made to the field. None of the watershed projects visited by the Committee were supported by this combination. They were managed either by NGOs only (like Ralegaon Siddhi) or by Government only (Kabbenala and Mittemari in Karnataka). PIDOW Gulbarga, the only project which was supported by the Government, NGO and people’s institutions or CBOs

was not visited by the Committee.

As a result, the Committee had to deal with extreme positions. In fact in the first draft of the report, Government was entirely excluded from the role of implementing watershed projects on the grounds that reforming Government to adopt a participatory approach was hopeless. Only NGOs were to be entrusted with this role. This was the stated position of Ralegaon Siddhi. However, it was soon realised that this position was not tenable. Both Government and NGOs had a role as implementing agencies. The Hanumantha Rao Committee rightly stressed that the objective of interveners was to build up the capacity of the democratically constituted local self Government institutions and voluntary organisations of the people to take the lead in watershed development and maintenance. Myrada carried this vision a step further. It considers the major objective of the intervening partners (Government and NGO) to be the building up of people’s institutions so that they emerge as the third and leading partner. This will ensure that the pressure of convergence and integration will originate from the people’s institutions whose requirements related to costs, timing of planning, implementation, budgeting, etc., will take priority.

5. Were learnings from PIDOW Gulbarga institutionalised in watershed strategy in Karnataka?

Unfortunately, no in-depth studies of the processes that emerged in Gulbarga were carried out by GOK during the 1990s even though Gulbarga was conceived partly as a search for answers. Some of the insights and learnings were recorded by Myrada staff in several papers between 1988 and 1992 and finally in a booklet by this writer published in 1993 and titled “The interventions of a Voluntary Agency in the emergence and growth of People’s Institutions for the Sustained and Equitable Management of Micro Watersheds”. However, this was not adequate to trigger off policy change in the watershed programmes of the GOK, or even to produce relevant guidelines to guide watershed programmes promoted by the Government. It was considered to be a NGO exercise. For such institutionalisation to take place, there is need for a combined team including Government to carry out the analysis and for the Development Commissioner and secretary RD & PR to be actively involved in the process

The reasons for lack of this follow through are many. It could have been partly due to the fact that the major watershed programmes under the DPAP and DDP are all centrally sponsored schemes. Policy change therefore was expected to originate from the Ministries at the Centre – as it finally did in the mid 1990s as explained above. As a result, the state perhaps did not feel comfortable to draw up the guidelines to institutionalise participation of people’s institutions below the Zilla Panchayat in watershed programmes. Another reason perhaps was that the Departments involved with watershed programmes were convinced that they had all the experience required from being involved in the World Bank watershed projects which had been running since the 1970s and which had been held up as a breakthrough mainly because of physical and vegetative structures and their impact on agricultural productivity. It must be pointed out, however, that people’s participation as developed in Gulbarga and elsewhere did not play a major role in these projects. This opinion can be challenged but it does have some substance. While an integrated strategy was very much part of the World Bank discourse during the late 1970s and 80s, the role of participation and people’s institutions was not even a marginal issue in the World Bank during the 1970s and early 80s; to claim that these features were incorporated in the watershed strategy of the GOK and the World Bank during the 1970s and 80s would be a claim which has little evidence in support. The major break through which involved people’s institutions occurred only in the KAWAD Project (1999) and then in SUJALA (2001). As mentioned above, both these watershed projects introduced participatory people’s institutions like the SHGs and watershed management associations like the User/Area groups in their strategies. They also introduced a system in which while the Zilla Panchayat was involved in the programme, the focus and integration of a watershed strategy was preserved.