Plan it right, the older way

The community here is not an abstract “samaj”. It is the persons and households who actually inhabit the forest or the hill slope or the valley, which is the watershed. They live in it and live off it. The first principle of the Bopal Declaration was putting “community based organisations” (CBOs) in the driver’s seat and the second one was “equity”. Equity here means everyone must get involved and this should not be based on the amount of land they own, their position in the social or caste pecking order, or their gender. That is, the community plans, builds and implements by contributing its own resources and borrowing and then runs the enterprise. It is a community, but also a business. Everybody takes part in decision-making and evaluation of benefits, not only the large shareholders. I get a kick when a group called Do It First sends me an e-mail saying they have set up a producer’s company under the Company Act to export tea from Coorg under a law I had drafted in which a coop can become a company but with a single share being one vote.

In 2004 just before the election, the then government decided to hand over the management of watersheds to panchayats under the Harayali Guidelines. There is probably the mistaken belief that when checks are handed over to sarpanchs, you win elections. They lost the elections, but also put a spanner in the works. Panchayats are terribly important, but they are not stakeholder organisations. They must build, run and maintain schools, roads, street lights and health centres, but not dairies, rice fields and watersheds. Not all villagers have cows, rice fields and are in a watershed. Geography has its own compulsions and watersheds can cut across panchayats. Besides, who will give a business loan to a panchayat and enter into a purchase contract with it. If a panchayat or a part of it can be a good CBO, let it run the system; otherwise the CBO can be a stakeholder institution with, of course, the panchayat’s support. Anyway, we do know that a good thing that was going got atrophied. In one state where watershed development was running around a lakh hectares, after the new set-up it went down to less than 3,000 hectares since nobody knew what to do.

The Bopal Declaration in 10 principes asks for organisation and funding through a national set-up like the NDDB, facilitating agencies backstopping the CBOs, constant feedback through a monitoring and feedback system, training and software and capacity building. Development is always running up the downstairs stretch since aspirations and opportunities rise, so there must be Watershed Plus, since once water is harvested and hunger is a thing of the past, we must plan for the good life — and it can be done.

M.S. Swaminathan and C.H. Hanumantha Rao support the CBO set-up. Yugandhar was with us at Bopal. We lobbied with the Planning Commission and now are at the doorsteps of the highest decision-maker in the land. Meanwhile, I thought I would lobby you.