A perspective of watershed development in the central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand – A paper by Malavika Chauhan

 It traces the historical growth of thinking on watershed in the region, and highlights issues and influences. Impacts and benefits are discussed in relation to sustainability. The review shows that success in these projects is usually isolated, mostly seen in small micro-watersheds with naturally good water harvesting conditions.

Overall, the results and impacts of watershed programmes in the region have been vastly disproportionate to financial and technical inputs, usually because benefits are slow, gradual and unevenly distributed. The evolution in the design of projects resulted from learnings, more from failures than success, and led to increasing awareness and understanding amongst the target population.

The involvement of NGOs, which bring a strong social organizational aspect to the activities, brought necessary focus to the programmes. Further, increased and systematic participation of agencies other than NGOs – the government departments, banks and village level institutions increased the degree of sustainability. However, in some areas unhealthy levels of community dependence on NGOs are visible, losing the long-term sustainability factor.

Gaps in the understanding of technical aspects including hydrogeological issues, changing livelihood and land use patterns, and upstream-downstream linkages continue to undermine possible impacts. However, watershed programmes are evolving with time, adapting and streamlining thinking and processes, and lessons learned are being used in the design and development of future programmes.

The experience of numerous watershed projects in Uttarakhand, marked by the existence of gaps between concept and implementation, the lack of field coordination and the genuine lack of understanding in the way project implementation translates into results in the field on a large scale, is common to numerous administrative programmes in many regions and countries. This is in no way a unique experience. The negative is that the funds allotted to such programmes do not give the results and benefits expected of them, while the positives are the numerous lessons learned on which future programmes can be designed.

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