Mission Kakatiya for Rejuvenating Tanks in Telangana: Making it a Mission Possible
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend first four sharpening my axe- Abraham Lincoln
In 2014, the government of the newly carved state of Telangana launched an ambitious project, titled Mission Kakatiya. It is about rejuvenating the 47,000 tanks and lakes spread over nine districts of the State by the year 2020, to bring them back to the past glory, the glory they had when such structures were first built during the rule of the Kakatiya dynasty, which ruled the region. A notable trend during the dynastic period was the construction of reservoirs for irrigation in the uplands, and around 5,000 of them were built by warrior families subordinate to the Kakatiya rulers.
The Mission envisaged enhancing the agriculture based income for small and marginal farmers by accelerating the development of minor irrigation infrastructure, strengthening community based irrigation management and adopting a comprehensive programme for restoration of tanks. The government has prioritized the restoration of minor irrigation tanks to restore and enhance their effective storage capacity to 255 TMC, so as to fully utilize Telangana’s allocation of 255 TMC (7,725 MCM) of water from Godavari and Krishna. The restoration works sanctioned are de-silting of tank beds, repair of sluices, repairing of feeder channels etc. and is to be completed in a time span of five years.
The initiatives to rejuvenate the tanks in the region are not new. They were many attempts in the past to rejuvenate the tanks in the erstwhile undivided AP state. However, this is the first attempt by any State government to rehabilitate such a large number of water bodies in one go, using funds from its own budget. There were many earlier attempts at rehabilitation of tanks, but were all done with international funding. These works largely involved civil works such as strengthening of the embankments, construction/repair of waste weir/sluice, lining of canals, cleaning of supply channels and jungle clearance. Then there was this garnishing with new water users’ associations! The underlying assumption was that the tanks were degraded because the tank management institutions that existed in the past collapsed (with the demolition of the Zamindari system and introduction of Ryotwari system and a few other factors) and that once WUAs (of ayacut farmers) are created, things would all fall in place. A related assumption was that the WUAs would de-silt the tanks periodically, clear the supply-channels and maintain the water distribution channels, equitably distribute the water and the performance of the tanks would henceforth be better, with larger inflows from their catchments.
If this was so easy as it is made out to be, it is equally intriguing that no scholar really bothered to find out how come in the past no village community really came forward to persuade the government to ‘rehabilitate’ a system, which was claimed to be offering such great benefits to the poor people but were brought to disuse by external factors, through some of the civil works mentioned above. The real issue is that the tanks and tank management institutions of South India were so glorified that few questioned the validity of two underlying theories in tank management programmes--first relates to what civil works can do to alter the tank hydrology, and the second relates to the impact of institutions on tank hydrology, in the current scheme of things. All these approaches inherently consider the village communities as hapless spectators to the assault on their tanks by external agents, who encroaches tank supply channels, tank beds and catchments, and not as party to this. But, this is far from the reality. As noted by a scholar, Esha Shah (2008) who worked extensively on tanks in South India, the tanks in South India stood testimony to the increasingly extractive statecraft involving coerced labour, highly oppressive caste systems, the expropriation of surplus by elites, and were symbols of enormous money and muscle power enjoyed by feudal landlords and warlords, respectively.
Nevertheless, the outcome of these interventions was that these tanks hardly performed any better than in the past few decades. The major problem was the inadequate inflow from their catchments. But, there was hardly any systematic and scholarly attempt to understand ‘where the water was disappearing’ or in other words, what was causing reduction in inflows into the tanks from their catchments, with the exception of the one sponsored by DFID in Karnataka and AP (see Batchelor et al., 2002). Their study showed how intensive watershed work and increased groundwater draft in the catchments reduced the tank inflows. Ignoring all these factors, the blame eventually went to the lackadaisical attitude of the agency towards building water user associations (though there is no denial of the fact that this was also done mechanistically)!
Coming back to Mission Kakatiya, even after several years of experience with tank rehabilitation, we seem to be repeating those historical mistakes of following a pure civil engineering approach to tank rehabilitation with no attention being paid to hydrology and ecology. The focus is on earthwork, waste weir construction, canal lining etc., and more of these structural interventions essentially mean more money for such projects. Though it is a noble idea to make water available to distressed populations in the State, who had invested in unsuccessful bore wells, the approach seems to miss out on the fact that mere de-silting or deepening of tanks may not lead to overall increase in water availability. As a matter of fact, none of these interventions can alter the hydrology of the tank catchments. Unfortunately, such projects pass through the scrutiny of economists and planners, with a myriad of exaggerated benefits such as direct irrigation, groundwater recharge, nutrient rich silt as fertilizers, fish production, etc. One only wonders, how the estimates of irrigation potential are arrived at when one doesn’t really know how much inflows these tanks would receive.
In reality, almost 85% of the gross irrigated area in Telangana is from wells and only about seven per cent is from tanks. Further, 90 per cent of the tanks in Telangana are small tanks with a command area of less than 100 acres and together they irrigate only one third of the total tank irrigated area. A total of 3,864 large tanks account for 67 per cent of the tank irrigated area. If it is so, one needs to understand the economic rationale behind picking up all the tanks for rehabilitation. Thus, it needs to be seen the difference these renovated tanks can make after a huge public expenditure. Already, there are reports on large-scale corruption involving contractors and some officials from irrigation department and poor implementation of the scheme. In some case, contractors are charged with not having adequate resources to undertake de-silting and in many other cases deepening works.
Earlier research by Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP) in undivided AP, with detailed field surveys in Kurnool, Nizamabad and Vizianagaram, had shown that there is excessively high degree of degradation of tanks in the past four decades or so. Further, two important processes are altering the hydrology of these tanks. First is intensive use of groundwater in the catchment (through bore wells), which reduces the base flows (or groundwater outflow into the streams) which contribute to the tank inflows. Secondly, the increased cultivation facilitated by access to wells for irrigation in the catchment, led to runoff from the catchment getting captured by the farm bunds and used in situ. In many areas like in northern Karnataka, there is a lot of plantation of water guzzling trees such as Eucalyptus in the catchment, which leave no water downstream (these trees act like pumps, sucking the water from the deep strata and grow very fast). This is indicated by the negative correlation between: 1] density of wells in the catchment and rate of reduction in tank performance; and, 2] cropping intensity and rate of reduction in tank performance. The tanks whose catchments did not experience cropping intensification and increase in irrigation wells over time continue to perform well (Kumar and Vedantam, 2016).
These findings have serious implications for the way tank rehabilitation programme should be undertaken. What we need is a systematic assessment of the catchment hydrology of individual cascades, rather than doing rehabilitation ‘lock, stock and barrel’, in an effort to make it a ‘mass movement’. There is a need to pick up only those tanks of which enough water is generated in the catchments and then do repair works, if required, to improve the system performance. Unfortunately, there are no quick ways to assess the runoff generation potential of these tank catchments. The streams draining into these tanks are not gauged. But, going by the previous discussion, it is quite obvious that tanks which are characterized by intensive cultivation in their catchment with a high density of irrigation well, should be entirely excluded.
For the rest, runoff has to be estimated using some standard methodologies for each tank cascade system. The run off coefficient would depend on the catchment land cover, the soil infiltration capacity the antecedent soil moisture. The usual practice in the minor irrigation departments is to use the ‘rational formula’, which uses the catchment area, a ‘runoff coefficient’ and the average rainfall of the catchment, or the strange formula, which assumes a runoff coefficient based on whether a catchment is good or degraded. Again, given the high year to year variation in the rainfall in these regions, we need to estimate the runoff for typical rainfall years (very wet year, normal year and a very dry year), during which the pattern as well as the magnitude of rainfall changes significantly. Once assessment is done, the tank capacity enhancement should not be undertaken to capture the runoff that occurs in a very wet year (which is once in 10 or 20 years), as is usually done. This is because under such a scenario, there would be no outflows from the tank even in the wettest year. The project planners need to recognize the fact that the outflows from these tanks ultimately end up in a river which either drain into a tributary of Krishna or Godavari.
The question then comes as to what to do with the tanks which are heavily degraded. Yes, de-silting would help, as it would produce good nutrient rich soils for farmers. But, this is just a one-time activity and one should not be inflating the benefits of crop yield improvement due to application of the silt, and it takes many years for good quality silt to get deposited in the tank bed. The initial enthusiasm of the farmers, who collect the silt from the tank bed, would fade very quickly after the first monsoon when they do not see much water in their tanks. For such tanks, there is no point in doing heavy earthwork for capacity enhancement, bund stabilization, waste weir construction etc., all of which involve huge capital investments.
Contrary to this grave reality, the false argument, which is being paraded by some vested interests, is that the monsoon water just runs off un-captured and that we need to store it in the tanks, and for that their capacity need to be enhanced. Yes, in some years water flows down. But, we need to recognize the fact that it is not going directly into the Ocean. It enters the rivers downstream, and there are many large reservoirs built in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states to capture that water on those rivers.
Unless, the desilted tanks in the region get water from exogenous sources, there is no way the region as a whole will witness increase in tank irrigated area. The simple reason is that the total water withdrawal in the region today exceeds the renewable water generated within the region, except for the water in Godavari basin. The groundwater depletion and rampant well failures in many parts of Telangana is a manifestation of the precarious water balance. By performing de-silting and deepening in some cases, the government may end up re-distributing the water in the basins of the State with resultant adverse impact in the downstream areas. Hence, instead of taking a popular approach, effort should be on improving the overall water balance of the region. Further, this should be complemented with increasing area under micro-irrigation systems, to manage irrigation water demand.
The total budget for Mission Kakatiya is around Rs.12500 crore for five years. There is no doubt that even if 0.1% of this money is spent in doing a scientific assessment of the hydrology of the catchments, a lot of the precious money can be saved. By doing this, it would be possible to know which local catchments have surplus water that can be stored by increasing the capacity of the cascade tanks, and which of the tanks would require imported water. But, doing good hydrological assessments for good planning would take time. Benefits would be accrued from well-conceived and well-implemented projects. When the local people find real benefits coming from such projects--better irrigation, fish production, water for livestock--, they would participate.
(Prepared by M. Dinesh Kumar, Nitin Bassi, K Sivarama Kishan, Shourjomoy Chattopadhyay and Arijit Ganguly. The authors are from the Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy)
References
Batchelor, Charles, Ashok Singh, MS Rama Mohan Rao and Johan Butterworth (2002) Mitigating the Potential Unintended Impacts of Water Harvesting, paper presented at the IWRA International Regional Symposium ‘Water for Human Survival’, 26-29 November, 2002, Hotel Taj Palace, New Delhi.
Kumar, M. Dinesh and N. Vedantam (2016) Groundwater Use in Decline in Tank Irrigation? Analysis from Erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, in Kumar, MD, AJ James and Y. Kabir (Eds), Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses and Livelihood Security, Elsevier, Singapore.
Shah, Esha (2008) Telling otherwise a historical anthropology of tank irrigation technology in South India, Technology and Culture 49 (3): 652-674.