Sukhomajri, a village in Haryana’s Panchkula district, became a model of self-reliant development in the 1980s. Its journey from the depths of poverty to a level of prosperity that made it the first Indian village to pay income tax has been a source of inspiration the world over. What lay behind this incredible story was its success in managing its ecological wealth by creating a powerful and united village institution: the Hill Resource Management Society (hrms).

Down To Earth(dte) has tracked this village’s fortunes close on 15 years (see ‘Partners in prosperity’, February 15, 1994; ‘Sukhomajri at the crossroads’ December 15, 1998; and ‘Foisting failure’, August 31, 2002).

•  Untapped resource

On its last visit it found changes—not all for the better. Gurmel Singh, the president of the hrms, says the village is no idyll anymore. “I have just inherited the lustre of past laurels,” he says. The debates over managing resources that used to churn the community have died—hrms has not met once in the past five years.

Not surprisingly. Sukhomajri thrived on forests and water resources—hrms managing both. But the equation has changed. The forest department has hijacked the forest the villagers created, while control of water is going into private hands. “There is hardly any reason for the society to exist,” says Gurmel Singh.

The journey
Sukhomajri’s journey began in 1976 with the arrival of scientists from the Chandigarh-based Central Soil and Water Conservation Research and Training Institute (cswcrti). They were looking for a solution to the silting of the Sukhna Lake, Chandigarh’s only water source. The scientists found the problem was run-off from the denuded hills there. Their solution lay in preventing the villagers from grazing their cattle in the forest, who had no stake in listening to them. They agreed to stop the grazing only when the scientists agreed to build dams—the first in 1976—that would provide them water. Enlightened self-interest won: villagers got water, protected forests and got more water and fodder; Sukhna too was saved.

“In many ways the Sukhomajri experiment was the first instance of challenging the top-down model of development,” says S P Mittal, one of the scientists who started the project with the late P R Mishra, who inspired the Sukhomajri model.

In five years, the village got three more dams and in 1983 formed hrms with a member from each household. Later all adult residents became members. All residents got equal rights over water (see timeline: Divergent trajectories). To inculcate efficient use, the tariff was based on period of consumption rather than the amount used. hrms’s revenues from various sources were used to maintain the dams and the pipelines to distribute water, and protect the forests.

The results soon began to show. The yield of wheat and maize, the two staple crops, rose by over 50 per cent between 1977 and 1986. Production of grass, crucial as fodder, rose from 40 kg per hectare (ha) in 1976 to 3 tonnes in 1992. In the forest, the number of trees rose from 13 per ha to 1,292 per ha. With more fodder available, the number of goats fell from 246 to 10 from 1977 to 1986, while the number of buffaloes rose from 79 to 291. Milk production rose steeply as a result.

Sukhomajri is still wealthy—at Rs 15,000, villagers earned 2.5 times Haryana’s rural per capita income in 2005. Almost every family owns a car. Close to 560 buffaloes and cows provide 3,000-4,000 litres of milk a day, sold at Rs 12 per litre. “The annual per capita income has doubled from the 1990s and tripled from the 1970s,” says Gurmel Singh.