ACWADAM

Rapid increase in the use of groundwater and its declining availability has threatened the existence of this important resource. A community experiment by Desh Bandhu and Manju Gupta Foundation (DBMG), which involves implementing water resource development and mobilising farmers to use groundwater as a common resource through group wells, is showing good results.

Waghad Dam in Nashik, Maharashtra, constructed in 1984-85, irrigated less than 1% of its total irrigable command area, while farmers in the tail area did not receive any water. Bapu Upadhye of Samaj Parivartan Kendra organised the local farmers, mobilized them to come together and fight for their water quota.

A civil society consultation was held on “Regenerating natural resources and rural livelihoods in rainfed areas of India” by WASSAN at Hyderabad in December 2010 to discuss priorities for the twelfth five year plan. The Planning Commission, Government of India has been steering the process of development in India by conceptualizing five year plans and had sought inputs from civil society organizations, activists groups, networks of CBOs / NGOs, donors and others for preparing an approach paper for twelfth plan.

The objective of the consultation workshop was to contribute to the process of defining broad contours of twelfth plan with a focus on rural livelihoods the thrust area being policy framework, funding support, institutional arrangements etc., by -

• Consolidating the lessons from good practices in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods in the country, that could be integrated in twelfth five year plan.
• Systematically articulating issues and concerns (bottlenecks) in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods, which could be addressed in the twelfth five year plan.

Advanced Center for Water Resources Development and Management (ACWADAM) is a premier education and research institution and facilitates work on groundwater management through action research programmes and trainings. ACWADAM’s main thrust has been on the process of capacity building and facilitation, both founded strongly on its research base.

ACWADAM, with support from the Ford Foundation, has embarked on strengthening civil society capabilities in groundwater management, using the watershed management platform. A comprehensive training module on basic hydrogeology and groundwater science, has been developed, and can be sourced by writing to ACWADAM at acwadam@vsnl.net.

These trainings enable the trainees particularly from Civil Society Organisations to improve the planning, implementation and monitoring of their watershed development and allied projects.

A sharing workshop on groundwater organised by ACWADAM (Advanced Center for Water Development and Management) in Pune on 21/22nd May 2009 saw some very good presentations being made. Dr Tushaar's Shah's keynote speech provided an amazing big picture of groundwater use in agriculture. The presentation can be viewed on slideshare and the entire speech is available on YouTube in 4 parts.