After 10 years & Rs 9,630 crore, scheme for drought-proofing Maharashtra can provide water to just 487 people for a year

It is a colossal failure. A decade of work and an expenditure of nearly Rs 10,000 crore later, a scheme touted by the Maharashtra government as a silver bullet for the state’s drought-related problems has come a cropper.

The Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan (JSA) has created a total of 24 thousand cubic metres (TCM) of water storage, with an irrigation potential of 3.4 million hectares.

That is just enough to provide 487 people with water for an entire year calculated as per the 135 litre per capita per day (LPCD) norm for a Tier I city (with a population of 100,000 or more, according to the 2001 Census of India), as per Sushmita Sengupta, senior programme manager of water programme at Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi.

The JSA was aimed to ‘drought-proof’ Maharashtra by 2019 through various soil and water conservation activities such as creating cement barrages as well as deepening, widening and de-siltation of water bodies.

The state government’s 630,000 water conservation interventions across 22,586 villages under the JSA cost the public exchequer Rs 9,630 crore, according to the 2020 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG).

And it is not just the JSA. In another policy decision from 2016-17, the state government had announced a scheme to provide subsidies to farmers for constructing farm ponds for water harvesting and conservation. It received 35,00,000 applications in the first year itself.

Besides in 2018, the state launched a Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture (PoCRA) — also known as Nanaji Deshmukh Krushi Sanjeevani Prakalp. It aimed to increase the adaptive capacity of marginalised farmers from 5,142 villages in 15 districts of the Marathwada region.

The total cost of the project was estimated to be Rs 4,000 crore, 30 per cent of which was to be borne by the state while the remaining by the World Bank.

There have been other schemes and interventions from the state government such as the Integrated Watershed Development Program, Marathwada Water Grid Project, Gaalmukt Dharan and Gaalyukt Shivar among others since the Maharashtra Water Policy came into being in 2012.

Read Will Afghanistan’s centuries-old ‘Karez’ system of irrigation survive the Taliban

However, the government has failed to provide any relief to Maharashtra’s farmers and rural inhabitants.

Not a drop left

As of April 4, as summer approaches its peak, the Marathwada region has 953 government and private tankers distributing drinking water across five of its eight districts. The highest number of water tankers are being supplied in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad) district at 443, followed by Jalna at 321 and 117 water tankers in Beed.

Bhagwat Kharag, a farmer from Kadethan village in Paithan taluka of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district, said the village (with a population of about 5,000 people) has been relying on water tankers from the government for the past month.

“Water sources such as dug wells and groundwater sources have dried up. The village receives two water tankers a day. Each carries 20,000 litres of water,” he said.

Kharag said the villagers also rely on private water tankers. They have to pay Rs 800 for a 5,000-litre tanker. “The requirement and costs will only increase as summer peaks. The cost of each tanker for the same quantity can reach up to Rs 1,500,” he added.

Dhananjay Gundekar, a farmer from Ambesavali village in neighbouring Beed district, said his village was in the same boat as Kadethan. “We are spending about Rs 40,000 per month on water tankers,” he said.

Gundekar added though that Ambesavali was in a better condition as the Ambejogai taluka it was located in received 30 millimetres (mm) of rainfall in October, enabling residents to extend water availability.

Moreover, works in the village to conserve water under different schemes had not stopped.

Some 1,891 works related to water conservation, rainwater harvesting, renovation of traditional water bodies and tanks, reuse and recharge structures, watershed development and afforestation were completed between 2021 and 2023 in Chhattrapati Sambhajinagar, according to the Management Information System of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

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A total of 1,471 such works were completed in Dharashiv (formerly Osmanabad), 575 in Hingoli, 8,352 in Jalna, 1,862 in Latur and 1,294 in Nanded districts. Like Chhattrapati Sambhajinagar, all of these are located in the Marathwada region.

Malik Ambar and Aurangzeb

Marathwada was not always like this.

Kailash Tawar, a 60-year-old farmer from Paithan taluka, told Down To Earth (DTE) that 2020, 2021 and 2022 were the only years when he did not have to use water tankers.

“There was excess rainfall during these years and the water requirement sufficed. But since 1972, when the region saw one of its worst droughts, there has never been relief for farmers in the region,” he added.

The situation is only getting worse. According to the Groundwater Survey and Development Agency (GSDA), water levels have gone down to 3 metres from 1 metre in villages across 245 of 353 Maharashtra talukas between 2014 and 2019.

Gundekar recalled that during his childhood in the 1990s, the groundwater was available at 200 feet.

But the groundwater table has been rapidly declining since 2018, he added. Water levels have gone down to 1,000 feet from 500 feet since 2016, said Gundekar.

The number of tankers in 8,993 villages and hamlets of Maharashtra increased from 1,814 in the first week of May 2015 to 5,174 tankers during the corresponding period in 2019.

“Earlier, the government used to acquire local water sources within a kilometre’s range to provide water. Now, the same tankers have to travel a distance of 18 km to a medium water storage dam to procure water for us villagers,” Gundekar told DTE.

Climate change is making the state more vulnerable. Maharashtra has experienced a seven-fold and six-fold increase in drought and flood events over the past 50 years, according to a Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) report published in 2022.

Experts point to a number of reasons for the dire situation in Marathwada as well as Maharashtra.

Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar-based veteran economist H M Desarda said the JSA, de-silting of water barrages and other initiatives of the government were ‘unscientific in nature’.

Desarda even filed a public interest litigation, questioning the science in the scheme’s implementation. “None of the schemes follow the ridge-to-valley approach, which enables water to be arrested from catchment areas and diverted towards recharging aquifers,” he said.

The erstwhile Uddhav Thackeray government had ordered a probe into the scheme and had stopped it after claiming irregularities in its implementation.

The implementation of the schemes had caused negative impacts on local hydrogeology and had raised concerns on overall water allocation and equity concerns, the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) network had pointed out in 2016.

According to a research paper Challenging Today’s Water Threats for a Tenable Tomorrow: A Review of Policies and Programs in the Water Sector of Maharashtra published in March 2022, poor implementation, governance and unscientific approach to the schemes were to be blamed.

Eshwer Kale, lead author of the paper, said farm ponds have encouraged massive extraction and storage of groundwater. “Rich farmers have exploited the scheme to take control over water resources. The primary idea was to harvest rainwater. But the implementation has been poor,” he said.

The 2020 CAG audit report revealed that of the 80 villages which had been declared as ‘water neutral’, only 29 were actually that. The storage of other villages was less than what they had claimed.

The audit revealed that despite the implementation of the JSA campaign, the water tanker demand increased to 67,948 in 2019, from 3,368 in 2017 in six selected districts.

Moreover, the CAG found that groundwater exploitation increased with a spike in the number of dug wells and bore wells. Also, most water structures were structurally flawed among other discrepancies.

In addition to the poor implementation of policies, the focus on recharging groundwater and aquifers was broadly ignored, the research noted.

Desarda said that apart from the unscientific approach in implementing policies, there was a lack of responsible governance.

Read 24x7 water in the 1700s

“The JSA encouraged farmers to grow more cash crops with farm ponds, further exploiting the precious resources. Most sugarcane cultivation and sugar factories in Marathwada happen and run on the back of extracted groundwater,” he said.

“The drought in Marathwada is clearly a human-made disaster, due to the mismanagement of water,” Desarda added.

However, the effective implementation of policies and a scientific approach can help to resolve the water crisis in the rain shadow region. Marathwada receives an average of 771 mm of annual rainfall. If it is harvested, the crisis can be mitigated, Desarda said.

Perhaps, the answers for the perennially drought-prone region lie in the past when rulers like the Siddi Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, Malik Ambar and Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (earlier the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan) introduced watershed management structures to ensure steady water supply.

Malik Ambar founded the city of Khadki, which was later captured by Aurangzeb and named ‘Aurangabad’.

These conduits, about 300 years-old, transported water from long distances through gravity in a manner similar to the aqueducts of ancient Rome. One such structure, the Thatte Neher or Neher-e-Ambari, draws water from the Harsool river 12 km away through aqueducts.

The water system helps meet drinking water requirements for about 10,000 people a year. “We need such scientific-based interventions where watershed programmes are implemented using ridge to valley approach,” Desarda said.

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