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NEWS ALERTS | The Power of Going Local: New FAO Study
The Power of Going Local: New FAO Study

The Power of Going Local: New FAO Study

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published Published on Jun 25, 2013   modified Modified on Jun 26, 2013
Groundwater, which irrigates half of Indian agriculture and provides 85% of rural drinking consumption, is an increasingly scarce resource. There is a growing understanding that it must be approached as a common property resource for collective benefit. It is best understood and managed by those who live near them and use them rather than agencies who visit sporadically - that is the central premise of efforts around participatory groundwater management.

 

A new FAO study (see the link below) analyses the lives of two successive Participatory Groundwater Management programs in Andhra Pradesh, which ran from the mid-1990s to 2010, and were centred around small wells, typically servicing a few families each. The programs ran in 660 villagers across drought-prone districts of Andhra Pradesh, and by their culmination had and involved the participation of nearly 20,000 farmers as barefoot technicians.

The core principles adopted by these programs were: demystifying hydrological science and technology for rural communities; enabling them to blend their local knowledge for sustainable management of their groundwater resources through a network of Farmer Water Schools and information kiosks, and an emphasis on reducing agricultural water demand through options such as reduction in the number of new wells that might lead to unsustainable over extraction (voluntary self-regulation), changes in cropping pattern, efficient water use and soil moisture management. The programs also addressed the overarching issue of hydrological data scarcity--necessary to formulate better policies--by involving farmers in the collection and recoding of such local data.

The report suggests that the success of these programs lay in the fact that they recognised information, education and social mobilization as key objectives of a participatory model and not subsidiary criteria.

 

Further Reading:

 

Smallholders and sustainable wells - A Retrospect: Participatory Groundwater Management in Andhra Pradesh (India) by Samala Venkata, Govardhan Das and Jacob Burke (2013), FAO, http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3320e/i3320e.pdf

 

Managing the Invisible: Understanding and Improving Groundwater Governance (2012)- Marcus Wijnen, Benedicte Augeard, Bradley Hiller, Christopher Ward and Patrick Huntjens,
http://water.worldbank.org/sites/water.worldbank.org/files
/publication/ESW_Managing-the-invisible.pdf

 

A presentation by Tushar Shah of the International Water Management Institute
http://www.slideshare.net/indiawaterportal/growing-role-of
-groundwater-in-indian-irrigation-in-transition

 

Water: Towards a Paradigm Shift in the Twelfth Plan -Mihir Shah, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol xlviiI 40, No 3, January 19, 2013,
http://www.im4change.orghttps://im4change.in/siteadmin/tin
ymce/uploaded/Mihir%20shah.pdf

 

Bringing public participation to the water table, CSIRO, 28 March, 2013, http://www.csiro.au/en/Organisation-Structure/Divisions/La
nd-and-Water/Public-Participation-in-Water-Initiatives.asp
x

 

The Central Groundwater Board's 2012 analysis,
http://cgwb.gov.in/documents/GROUND%20WATER%20LEVEL%20SCEN
ARIO_November-12.pdf

 

Water in India: Situation and Prospects (2013), UNICEF, FAO and SaciWATERs, http://www.im4change.org/docs/656water-in-india-report.pdf

 

Towards Better Management of Ground Water Resources in India - BM Jha and SK Sinha,
http://www.cgwb.gov.in/documents/papers/incidpapers/Paper%
201-B.M.Jha.pdf

 

Water: India's Big Resource Challenge,
http://www.im4change.org/news-alerts/water-indias-big-reso
urce-challenge-20416.html

 

Image courtesy: FAO, http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3320e/i3320e.pdf



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