| Hivre Bazar: From crisis to opportunity |
Residents of Hivre Bazar, a village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, have not forgotten their long journey from a water scarce village to a surplus one. “Eking out a life from the village was practically unthinkable in the 1970s-80s as water scarcity and land degradation made agriculture redundant,” says Popatrao Pawar, the village sarpanch. Pawar’s parents had then sent him to another village for pursuing studies.
However, things are different now. Everybody boasts of the village’s water conservation works that have resulted in extraordinary rise in local income.
At an average every village resident earns an amount, which is twice the average of the top 10 per cent earning population in rural areas. In the last 15 years the average income has gone up by 20 times. The forest here is well preserved; the fields are green and the residents happy. Living in the rain shadow area with less than 400 mm of rainfall per annum has its blessings, only when you know how to manage the water.
An opportunity created out of crisis
Hivre Bazar faced acute water crisis and severe land degradation during the 1970s. The village’s traditional water storage systems were in ruins. People migrated in hordes due to constant crop failures and drought.
From being an important trade centre under the Maratha rulers, the village fell into economic ruin after the 1972 drought, one of the worst in the 20th century. During 1989-90, hardly 12 per cent of the cultivable land could be cultivated. The village’s wells used to have water only during the rainy season.
However, in the 1980s, the youth of Hivre Bazar began to think of bringing about changes. The elections to local panchayats in 1989 provided the right occasion. In search of a candidate who could be acceptable to all factions, the village youth zeroed in on Pawar, who won unopposed. From here started the village’s tryst with destiny. Inspired by social activist Anna Hazare, Pawar took up water conservation works.
Many mutinies in Hivre Bazar
The village adapted an integrated model of development with water conservation as its core. In 1993, the district social forestry department helped Pawar in regenerating the completely degraded 70 hectares (ha) of village forest and the catchments of the village wells.
With local labour donations, the panchayat built 40,000 contour trenches around the hills to conserve rainwater and recharge groundwater. Residents took up massive plantation and forest regeneration activities. Immediately after the monsoon, many wells in the village collected enough water to increase the irrigation area from 20 ha to 70 ha in 1993. “The village was just getting a bit of life back,” remembers Pawar. In 1994, the Maharashtra government brought Hivre Bazar under the Adarsh Gaon Yojana (AGY), a scheme to replicate the success story of Ralegan Siddhi scripted by Anna Hazare.
Sanstha (Yashwant Agriculture, Village, and Watershed Development Trust) -- to implement development works under AGY. “Villages and the government should be partners in development; but villages must be in the driver’s seat,” says Pawar.
Hivre Bazar’s strong and participatory institutional set up facilitated the initiatives. The gram sabha (village council) became the nodal institution deciding everything from identifying the site for a water harvesting structure to sharing of water and types of crops to be taken up with consensus. The village voluntary organisation became its implementing arm.
From 1995-2005, the village invested all its development money on water conservation – on recharging groundwater as well as creating surface storage system. It laid a tight trap to catch rainwater. The 70 ha of forestation helped in treating the catchments for most of the wells, 414 ha of contour bunding stopped run off and saved farms from silting, and around 660 water harvesting structures of various types captured rainwater.
The water economy
Since 2004, Hivre Bazar has been doing an annual budgeting of water. Every year it measures the total water available, estimates uses and then prescribes water uses through the gram sabha. The decisions of the gram sabha on water uses are binding.
After three years of budgeting, the village has come to know about its average water availability. It is estimated that with 400 mm of rainfall, Hivre Bazar will be water sufficient through the year. Since the village gets around 350 mm to 400 mm of rainfall at an average, it experiences a shortfall of 5 crore litres to 8 crore litres. To overcome this scarcity, Hivre Bazar has banned drilling of bore wells for irrigation. There are no violations.
The total rainfall received by Hivre Bazar was monitored along with the groundwater level at six observation wells. The cumulative of rainfall and groundwater is the total water available to the village after the monsoons.
After initial support from geologists, the gram sabha now budgets the water. It decided that from the total water available, water for drinking purposes (of humans and animals) and for other daily uses would get priority. Seventy percent of the remaining water will be used for irrigation. The remaining 30 per cent would be kept for future use by allowing it to percolate and recharge groundwater.
Taking this broad framework for water use, a yearly audit is carried out to assess the water available and adjust its use accordingly. In 2004, Hivre Bazar found a deficit of 8.65 crore litres of water. After the necessary changes in cropping pattern and uses, it came down to 4.39 crore litres in 2005. In 2006, the village had a surplus of 147.5 crore litres of water (See table: Water Balance Sheet 2006).
Water Balance Sheet 2006
From scarce to surplus
Last year Hivre Bazar had surplus water after 15 years of extensive water conservation. The village’s latest water balance sheet shows that the surplus was nearly 50 per cent of the total available water. This shows that scarcity is not the problem, management of water resources is.
Source of water |
Quantity of water in crore litres |
Runoff from rainfall |
549 |
Water lost as water vapour |
536.29 |
Category-wise availability of water |
|
a. Water as runoff |
54.59 |
b. Water lost as water vapour |
187.7 |
c. Stored surface water |
26.81 |
d. Water that percolates into the earth |
53.63 |
e. Sub-soil water as moisture or groundwater |
160.89 |
f. Groundwater due to water harvesting structures |
52.67 |
TOTAL water available (a+b+c+d+e+f) |
294 |
Water demand in the village |
|
i. Drinking water (humans and animals) |
3.39 |
ii. Water required for irrigation |
133.38 |
iii. Water required for additional/peripheral farming activities |
10.73 |
TOTAL |
147.5 |
The difference between availability and requirement (deficiency or surplus) |
|
Water available – water required |
146.5 |
Money rains
Hivre Bazar is now reaping economic harvests of water conservation. Grass production went up from 100 metric tonnes in 2000 to 1,000 metric tones in 2004. This resulted in increased milk production from a mere 150 litres per day during the mid-1990s to 2,200 litres per day presently. Soil erosion has reduced and the water table has gone up. The number of wells has increased from 97 to 217. Land under irrigation has gone up from 120 ha in 1999 to 260 ha in 2006 (See table: Cropping intensity in Hivre Bazar).
In 2006 the income from agriculture was Rs 247,84,000. This means a per capita agriculture income of Rs 1,652/month. This is almost double of the Rs 890/month income level for India’s top earning 10 per cent of the rural population in 2004-05.
According to the below poverty line (BPL) household survey conducted in 1992, 168 families out of 226 were BPL. There are now only three BPL families in Hivre Bazar. There has been an unbelievable 73 per cent reduction in poverty.
Cropping intensity in Hivre Bazar
Land use |
1996-97 |
1998-99 |
2002-03 |
Gross cropped area (ha) |
821 |
1.007 |
1,125 |
Net area cropped (ha) |
723 |
730 |
748 |
Area cropped more than once (ha) |
99 |
276 |
377 |
Cropping intensity |
1.14 |
1.38 |
1.50 |
Hivre Bazar’s message to India
In many ways, Hivre Bazar symbolises the problem of water management in villages. It also emerges as an example of how to fix the problem. In India, where it rains for roughly 100 hours of the year, the management of water is critical to water sustainability.
The current water crisis in India is not about scarcity. As the Hivre Bazar experience shows, it is about the management of water resources so that the infrastructure is capable of reaching out to poor people.
A careful understanding of the initiative shows that water management is not about technology, but about the manner of control and governance of the resource. It is about deepening democracy so that communities can be involved in the governance of the resource.
Three-fourths of the country’s irrigated area uses groundwater. Groundwater structures -- dug wells, shallow and deep tube wells -- have increased from 4 million in 1951 to 19 million presently. Thus there are as many decision-makers, who constitute the irrigation entrepreneurs of the country. Hivre Bazar is an example of how to manage multiple decision makers.
But even as groundwater has overtaken the surface water systems in terms of the acreage irrigated, what is of particular concern is that minor irrigation systems -- tanks, ponds and all other community-based and decentralised water harvesting systems -- have simultaneously declined in importance.
These systems played a critical role in the recharge of groundwater as they stored the monsoon rainwater, which then recharged underground aquifers. According to official estimates, poor maintenance, siltation and complete disregard for catchments areas of tanks had meant that the area irrigated by tanks declined from 3.6 million ha in the 1950s to 2.5 million ha by 2000. During the same period, the area irrigated by wells -- groundwater -- went up from 6 million ha to 36 million ha and more, out of a total irrigated area of 53 million ha.
Disconnect between tanks and wells: losing the sponges of India
Source: 2000-2001 data: Statistical abstract India 2003,
Anon, ‘Land using statistics at a glance’, http://agricoop.nic.in/statistics/st3.htm, as viewed on August 16, 2005
This means that the ability of rural people to benefit from decentralised water structures has declined, and has seriously compromised the sustainability of groundwater irrigation. The loss of water bodies has continued in the last decade. While the 2nd Minor Irrigation Census, conducted in the mid-1980s, counted 750,000 tanks and other surface water bodies, the next census enumerated only 556,000 such structures. This meant that there were even less recharge possibilities, and groundwater extraction had become more unsustainable.
The country has not learnt how it will build and maintain decentralised water systems, which in turn require decentralised governance. It is equally clear that technology choices and approaches for water management need to be changed. Currently drinking water programmes fail because they plan for the pipe and not the source of water.
It is here that India must learn from Hivre Bazar -- how people learnt to live both with the scarcity as well as excesses of water.
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