Home » Health & Wellness  » Environment and hygiene  » Tapping rural water resources The Community-based Tank Improvement and Management Project in Karnataka is low-tech, traditional and very down to earth. It is also very novel.

Dateline Bangalore

True to Bangalore style, it has an e-tag. Soon details of select tanks in arid and semi-arid areas of the State will go on the Net, so that nostalgic NRIs can sponsor their restoration and experts can suggest how to. The rest of the novel Community-based Tank Improvement and Management Project is low-tech, traditional and very down to earth.

The State government proposes to rehabilitate 5,000 traditional tanks with a little help and demand from villagers. The idea is to return them "with apologies" to their rightful owners, the village communities, from whom the Colonial administration snatched them away in 1860.

Under the control of various Government departments, irrigation, fisheries, horticulture, public works, you name it -- and participation by villagers, tanks silted up over a century. A loss of 40-50 per cent of storage space, experts estimate. And a sharp reduction in cultivable area.

"We estimate that there are about 36,000 tanks in the State, 90 per cent of them built by local people themselves. We have to return them to people with apologies,'' says Madan Gopal, the executive director of the Jala Samvardhane Yojana Sangha (JSYS), the government organisation that facilitates the project.

The Government has submitted a Rs 946.47 (including State share) project plan to the World Bank, and a plan to Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) for rehabilitation of 1000 tanks from 72 'critical' taluks.

A lean, 10-crore annual budget organisation, JSYS functions from a City office with ethnic decor. The president of its governing council is Chief Minister S M Krishna who is inspired by the success of the Madhya Pradesh watershed project, which helped his counterpart Digvijay Singh harvest votes.

On February 22, the Chief Minister symbolically launched the project at Devihosur village in Haveri taluk. JSYS is now busy organising workshops and rural meets with community leaders and gram panchayat (village council) representatives, who will do the restoration work, possibly with NGOs facilitated by JSYS.

Sticking to the project norms, the villagers of Devihosur have contributed 15 per cent of the project cost -- half of it upfront in cash, the rest pledged as materials and labour.

Meanwhile JSYS is collaborating with villages cleaning up 15 tanks in its focal areas-- 4 in Kolar, 2 in Chitradurga 1 in Belgaum; and 2 each in northern arid belt of Bellary, Koppal, Bidar and Humnabad.

JSYS aims to make villages green once again by "keeping tanks as social institutions". The holistic, sustainable approach will take into account what needs to be done at the catchment area of the tank, watershed (line of separation between water flowing into different rivers etc) groundwater recharge and tank storage.

"We will invest in agricultural support services, drinking water and improvement of rural livelihoods through productive use of water,'' says Gopal.

A key criteria for selecting areas for tank restoration will be the percentage of people below the poverty line living there. Percentages of female literacy, Dalit and tribal population in the area, unemployed persons as well as the number of tanks of various size will also count.

Using this criteria, 62 out of 175 taluks spread in ten agro-ecological zone of the State were selected, accounting for a total of 13,800 tanks. A more precise list is to be prepared.

"The key focus will be poverty reduction through participatory restoration and water management measures,'' Gopal says.

(Report published in The New Indian Express)