Villagers Count for Little

 Community involvement in natural resource conservation is a must for it to be successful. People must understand the need for such conservation and then design the structures and processes involved and then maintain them over long periods of time. This is the only way in which ecosytems can be restored for long term sustainability as is the aim of the United Nations which has declared this decade as one for ecosystem restoration. The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in Alirajpur has followed this practice over the last four decades and achieved exemplary success. 

However, the Government of Madhya Pradesh does not understand this one bit. It has set up a Rajeev Gandhi Watershed Management Mission (RGWMM) under the Panchayat and Rural Development Department as a stand alone organisation that does not consult with the people of a panchayat when carrying out its work. Neither are the people involved in the design and implementation of the structures nor are they made aware of the need to maintain them. The whole work is done by earthmoving machines and external labour and so the villagers neither get employment nor learn the skills involved.

Recently, in Dewas district the RGWMM has dug a number of ponds and tanks and built gabion structures on the channel through which the water is to reach them so as to hold the soil behind them and only let the water through. Gabion structures are boulders wrapped in wire mesh which are considerably cheaper than concrete check dams and more robust than just boulder bunds as shown below. 

Ideally the funds should have been transferred to the local panchayats and meetings held with the people about the need for such soil and water conservation structures and then they should have been trained to construct them and employed in the construction. This would have raised their awareness about the need for ecosystem restoration, provided employment and ensured future maintenance through ownership of the structure. 

Bypassing the panchayats in this way and relying on standalone departments to carry out ecosytstem restoration work will be counterproductive because the crucial work of maintenance will not be done by the panchayats in the absence of awareness building and ownership by the people. However, the government is least bothered and is only interested in expending funds. This is the most serious problem with governance in this country - the refusal to give common people a say in development projects even when they are of a local nature like ecosystem restoration. So instead of strengthening and provisioning the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and making it the flagship for ecosystem restoration, a stand alone department is created to carry out the work with little or no involvement of local people.