Water Harvesting and Watershed Management

Technologies for Water Harvesting and" Watershed Management and is a paradigm shift ensuring supply of water to every field in the rainfed areas and this would remove hunger and poverty from the devastating dryland/drought-prone areas, restoring ecological balance, providing green cover over denuded areas, bringing in more rains, and improving the environmental, economy, ecology, export and equity in the country. Watershed management is some how getting in India, and this stage is of about 55 years of development, established during 1970 at the end period of Fifth Five Year Plan. Upto the end of Sixth Five Year Plan (1980-85), 2950 million hectares had been treated which represent 16.3 per cent of the total estimated problem area of 175 hectares.  It is more important to examine our weakness and failures in the watershed projects. The watershed management program achieves its objectives and the nation gets full value of time, money and priority being accorded to this program, standardization may facilitate the job of planners and policy makers, and may help the outsiders in planning and implementing watershed development projects. Uniformity is not compatible with land, crop husbandry, and diversified mixed farming systems for each plot of land and each household would necessarily need different treatments and dynamic combination in consonance with natural endorsement and socio-economic needs. The author, having some experiences of working in some watershed management projects and their evaluation, and water harvesting endeavours in the drought prone areas of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Orissa, has been prompled to write this book which role of watersheds in production agriculture, its origin, activities, and implementation in India, approach, experiences, drought management strategies, scenario, rainfed farming in India, organise and upgrading rainfed agriculture, water harvesting concept and technologies, planning and management of watershed projects, water wars in India, resource management with farming systems of watersheds in semi-arid India, people’s participation and community organizations in watershed management, gaps in watershed development projects, capacity building, impact, NGOs for implementation of watershed projects, participatory planning and management of watersheds, rural employment and agriculture, agri-business and agri-clinics, women in rural development, aquaculture, agricultural vision for 2020, etc.