Desilting tanks for improving water security and soil health
Travelling through rural Maharashtra evokes memories of the 1972 drought, one of the worst in the state’s history, which prompted the launch of a massive water conservation programme. In response to the severe shortfall of food, fodder, and drinking water, caused by low monsoon rainfall from 1970 to 1973, the state government, with the support of villagers, constructed hundreds of water conservation structures to capture rainwater. Many of these structures were built on community lands as ‘commons’ and are managed by local communities. One such structure — an earthen dam and its 21-hectare percolation tank — is located near Borgaon Math village in Jalna district, about 420 kilometres east of Mumbai. Jalna lies in the semi-arid Marathwada region of Maharashtra, infamous for recurring droughts and high farmer suicide cases. Over the years, the percolation tank in Borgaon Math had collected silt and could no longer capture and store rainwater and runoff. Recently, villagers came together to revive the waterbody as part of a community stewardship initiative. Not only have they desilted the tank, but they have also used the silt in their farmlands and are reporting a higher crop yield. “Our percolation tank was built way back in 1972 and had filled up with gaal [silt]. It no longer could hold any rainwater, which washed away as runoff in no time,” says Namdeo Sahebrao Kakode, secretary of Borgaon Math’s village development committee (VDC). “Two years ago, the villagers pooled their resources and desilted the tank using a JCB. The farmers used the thousands of quintals of silt that came out in their fields. Our tank is now brimming with rainwater, and our crop productivity has gone up manifold,” says the secretary. Borgaon Math has 82 households and a total agricultural land of 495 hectares. Jagan Sukhdev Joshi owns 1.6 hectares of land there. “My farmland was degraded; it had no topsoil and was filled with small stones; hence, whatever I cultivated, the yield remained low,” he tells Mongabay India. “I was part of the team that desilted our tank and I used 1,300 tractors-load of silt on my four-acre land,” says the farmer as he stands in his now waist-high soybean farm. He had to pay Rs. 100 per trip of tractor to transport silt to his farm, but the expenses were worth it, he says. “Earlier, my soybean production was barely eight to ten quintals. Since applying the silt, I have been able to harvest over 40 quintals. Each quintal of soybean is sold for about Rs. 4,500,” says Joshi. About 350 kilometres southeast of Borgaon Math lies Sagroli village in Biloli taluka of Nanded district, also a part of the Marathwada region. The Sagroli village pond had almost dried up, and the groundwater, the only source of irrigation for the farmers there, had plummeted below 150 metres. Sanskriti Samvardhan Mandal, a Nanded-based NGO, and the Department of Soil and Water Conservation, Nanded, decided to rope the villagers to desilt the pond to capture the rainwater. Around 11,000 cubic metres of silt was removed from the Sagroli pond, which the farmers used to level their farmlands. And the benefits have been immense, as recorded in a report, Back from the Brink: Rejuvenating India’s Lakes, Ponds and Tanks: A Compendium of Success Stories, released recently by a New Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). The report records how “the borewells near the pond became recharged. Groundwater increased by more than 100 metres. The irrigated area in the kharif and rabi seasons increased by 32% and 43% respectively.”