Land degradation and integrated watershed management in India

In view of the stagnating productivity levels of irrigated agriculture, the contribution from rainfed agriculture should be increased to meet the requirements from the ever growing human and animal population of India. Land degradation is a major threat to our food and environment security and the extent of degradation problems are more pronounced in rainfed regions. Large potential of rainfed agriculture is untapped largely due to lack of enabling policy support and investments. In drought-prone rainfed areas, watershed management has shown the potential of doubling the agricultural productivity, increase in water availability, restoration of ecological balance in the degraded rainfed ecosystems by greening these areas and diversification of cropping farming systems. Impact of various watershed programmes can be substantially enhanced by developing new approaches and enabling policies new paradigm based on learnings over last 30 years for people-centric holistic watershed management involving convergence, collective action, consortium approach, capacity development to address equity, efficiency, environment and economic concerns is urgently needed. However, this can be used as entry point activity for improving livelihood for rural community.It has been realized that for sustainable developments of degraded lands, involvement of people (land less and beneficiaries) is very much essential. For the last decade efforts have been made institutionalize the organizations of the community & beneficiaries and ensuring their involvement in planning project formulation, implementation and maintenance.Government of India has launched various centre-sector, state-sector and foreign aided schemes for prevention of land degradation, reclamation of special problem areas for ensuring productivity of the land, preservation of land resources and improvement of ecology and environment. These schemes are being implemented on watershed basis in rainfed areas. Soil conservation measures and reclamation of degraded lands are decided considering the land capability and land uses. The efforts made so far resulted in enhancement of agricultural production and productivity of lands, increase in employment generation, improving the environment of the areas and socio-economic upgradation of the people. Integrated watershed management approach has been adopted as a key national strategy for sustainable development of rural areas. This has been proved by conducting monitoring and impact evaluation studies of the integrated watershed projects by external agencies.