Faulty Schemes and the ‘Experts’ who idolise them

M. Dinesh Kumar, Yusuf Kabir, Mahendra Singh and Nitin Bassi

The controversy surrounding Jal Yuktha Shivar (JYS) project of Maharashtra doesn’t seem to be ending, if the findings of the CAG report of 2019-20 is to be taken seriously. With contradicting claims by the ruling and opposition parties, as available from various news reports, one wonders what actually is the impact of the scheme, where the truth lies. The political parties, many academic institutions and some water experts from Maharashtra had in the recent past made claims and counter-claims about the impact of the project, depending on what stakes they had in the project.

JYS is just one of the several schemes implemented by various state governments and the Union government to implement small-scale water management (read as water harvesting/recharge) projects in a decentralized format, during in the past 20 years in India. The scheme facilitated deepening of storage areas, widening of streams, construction of check dams, digging of farm ponds and work on nullahs (natural drains). Catchment treatment was not given due attention. The focus was more on ensuring community contribution.

Such projects in the name of community empowerment and people’s participation have become a hot favourite for every new government in the states and at the centre, in spite of growing evidence from research to the effect that such projects when implemented in the low rainfall, arid regions, have too little localized positive impacts, but had very significant negative impacts on water availability at the basin level, as well as in the downstream areas. However, policy makers are hardly interested in reading the published outputs from such research. Even when they read and appreciate the findings of such research, they are unwilling to confront the political class with facts to challenge these ‘popular’ schemes.

Disturbingly, the state level technical agencies were kept out of the project planning process. No comprehensive third-party evaluation of such projects, worth the name has ever been undertaken by the governments in power, while tax-payers money, along with poor people’s contributions in the name of voluntary labour, worth billions of rupees are being spent on such schemes—be it the JYS, or the NREGS.

In the case of JYS, an evaluation study sponsored by the earlier government, in the wake of growing criticism of the way the scheme was implemented, turned out to be controversial. The study, which came in support of the project for its ‘positive impacts’, depended entirely on a rapid field study involving ‘respondent survey’ conducted in a few villages of the state, while the scheme was supposed to have been executed in several thousand villages. Neither was there any hydrological impact assessment, nor any economic benefit cost analysis.

What the governments have been doing so far was to look for ‘patrons’ for supporting such schemes from the civil society. Mr Rajendra Singh, widely known as the ‘water man of India’, was the patron for JYS. His claim about the success of JYS and call to the Corporate to invest generously in the project suggests that he had visited the field several times and personally got convinced about the impact of the project in the form of rise in water level in the wells, though might not be supported by proper hydrological assessment that produce the hard data. They concern the following: the total number of structures built; total amount of water harvested or recharged per year; the cost of capturing a unit volume of water; and, total number of villages made drought-free.

Yet what is most important, but never discussed by these champions of decentralized water harvesting is the impact in the villages downstream of the project area; how many wells in those villages had gone dry and what happened to the small rivulets that used to flow earlier during good rainfall years. A study way back in 2008 showed that in Alwar (where Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) implemented water conservation projects) such adverse impacts were significant. Often, we forget that water is a common property resource and does not follow the administrative boundaries.

With the government planning to spend more than 7 lac crore rupees (US $ 95 billion approximately) under the Jal Jeevan Mission and Atal Bhujal Yojana in the next four years, there are important lessons it should draw from JYS.

The report of the Economic Survey report of 2019-2020 of the state of Maharashtra claimed that around 19,655 out of 25,000 villages had become drought-free in the State in last five years under the Jalyukta Shivar Project. The JYS also helped create a water storage capacity of 26.52 TMC (or 750 MCM) in Maharashtra (source: OpIndia.org). “Almost 10,718 works incurring the total expenditure of Rs 617.67 crore (approximately, US $ 800 million) was through public participation to Jalyukta Shivar”, noted the Economic Survey.

However, these claims have no empirical basis. No one really know what kind of criteria has been used to assess whether the village is drought prone or drought free, as one keeps hearing news of hundreds of villages in Marathwada and Vidarbha regions getting affected by severe water shortage during summer, after a failed monsoon, and thousands of tankers ply to supply drinking water to these villages. The real question is if the strategy for drought-proofing is so simple and can be managed with some simple earthwork, why do we invest several billions of rupees in states like Gujarat and Telangana for improving irrigation in the drought prone areas?

The Economic Survey also highlighted the ‘success story’ of another project, ‘Farm Pond on Demand’, that has helped in increasing productivity. It was also initiated by the earlier government to provide sustainable and protective irrigation facility during critical stages of growing crops. However, this scheme also faced severe criticism from researchers for being conceptually weak and only benefiting large farmers.

The findings of the Economic Survey (2019-20) report directly contradict the claims made by the State Water Resources Minister that the work executed as parts of the project were “substandard” and of “poor quality.” However, the new government in Maharashtra had already decided to scrap the project.

The CAG report of 2019-20 for Maharashtra had, however, opened the Pandora's box again. The report made a scathing attack on the performance of the scheme. The report found that the works completed under the projects were of substandard quality; the storages created were much less than the runoff potential of the catchment area; groundwater recharge was poor; and the scheme had too little impact on drought-proofing, in spite of spending 9633.8 crore rupees (approximately, 1.3 billion US dollars). The observation made by the CAG (based on a sample covering 120 villages, with 1128 structures) was that many of the storages created under the scheme were filled by the farmers, though the officials who implemented the scheme claimed of obtaining necessary consent from the farmers.

A report from OpIndia, which used the Economic Survey results to contest the criticism from the present state government, quoted Mr Rajendra Singh as saying that the shortcomings of the scheme were not in the scheme but its implementation. He also advocated a strict monitoring mechanism. However, such comments are of no consequence, when huge amount of tax-payers money is already wasted. First of all, when fundamental issues are raised about the effectiveness of a scheme in improving water availability and drought-proofing (by legitimate institutions, it is not appropriate to put the entire blame on ‘shoddy implementation’ and the officials who are responsible when they were not taken into confidence while planning such schemes along with State level Institutional experts.

It is not the first time that ‘experts’ disown projects that they had once patronized. It happened in the case of dug well recharging scheme (Bhujal Mitra) for which the central government invested Rs. 3418 crore rupees through NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development). When the scheme turned out to be a complete disaster, the ‘expert’ who managed to push the idea through the government system to get financial approval, put the blame on “its lousy implementation like in any other government scheme”.

The real problem is that the science of water is often compromised by certain individuals with limited understanding of hydrology or the sciences that matter, who want to shift the entire discussion to fringe issues like voluntary labour and employment generation in the name of empowerment and entitlement. They are driven by the philosophy that more structures mean more water, and the secret of success lies in community participation. While the first is hydrologically absurd, for the second, we still don’t have enough evidence to prove it. But we know that majority of the Gram Panchayats do not have the skill sets to manage a contractor or procurement of services in the absence of norms, standards and capacity to deliver. If lack of monitoring was the real issue, then they should have been asked for prior to the implementation.

The moot point is that these schemes are conceptually flawed, no matter how meticulously they are implemented! When most of the basins or sub-basins in the water-scarce regions of Maharashtra are fully-appropriated (with no extra runoff for further harnessing), how does one plan to create hundreds of thousands of new, mostly in the upper catchment of existing schemes? Hence it is difficult to depend on such Economic Survey reports, which base their findings on incomplete statistics and simplistic assumptions and devoid of any hydrological analysis, to argue in support of the project. It is even more risky to depend on the CAG report to critique the scheme, as the report’s findings are based on limited observations about the quality of construction and post construction maintenance, and not based on the review of any hydrological assessments and plans. This is sad, when we consider the fact that the state has many reputed organisations such as Water and Land Management Institute, Groundwater Survey and Development Agency and Maharashtra Water Resource Regulatory Authority.

What is required is a comprehensive benefit-cost analysis, supported by a proper water accounting study. The latter can tell us how much of the runoff water from the catchments got collected; how much of the water collected in the tiny structures got evaporated; how much is actually stored and recharged; and what has been the impact on reservoirs downstream.

In any case, JYS and many other schemes on local water conservation implemented in the country raise serious questions about the approach used for governance and management of water in the recent decades. While it is well understood that the village or the micro watershed cannot be the right unit at which governance and management of water should be practiced, implementation of such works in an uncoordinated fashion at the village level without a broader basin plan can have long term negative implications for governance and management of water.

First of all, we need to find ways to create a system where proper evaluation studies are carried out from time to time on the performance of such large schemes with the help of institutions of high repute. We also need to exercise enough caution to make sure that reputed government agencies are given priority before taking non-experts from outside for planning and executing projects of this nature. If these are not done, such schemes will lower the motivation level of people working in government institutions. It will exacerbate the gap between the rich and the poor, when such a large amount of money spent for such projects could as well be used for economic upliftment of people suffering from multidimensional and inter-generational poverty.

M. Dinesh Kumar is Executive Director of Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad. Yusuf Kabir is WASH Specialist, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Emergency and Climate Adaptation Focal Point, UNICEF Field Office-Mumbai. Mahendra Singh is Adviser-Projects and Partnership-IRAP. Nitin Bassi is Principal Researcher-IRAP, New Delhi. The reviews expressed in this article are personal. Email: [email protected]