By a correspondent | July, 2002

Practically forgotten by planners for over a century, water tanks are suddenly looking like a sound solution for communities without access to river water. CleanGanga.com takes a closer look.

	Water Reservoirs in Karnataka

As dark monsoon clouds hover over the vast Deccan Plateau, the villagers of Karnataka State are gearing up once again to collect the last drop of rain. That means it is time to remove silt and muck from the water tanks - the traditional village reservoirs that collect rainwater.

Restoring tanks is something like a village festival. Elder women light incense sticks, while marigolds bedeck the machines meant to perform the task - excavators, backhoes, bulldozers or plain spades wielded by a hundred village hands.

The state managed 37,000 tanks that harvest rainwater and that were built and looked after by villages until the colonial rulers snatched most of them away in 1860, purportedly to be supervised by government agencies. "We want to return them with apologies and restore them," says Madan Gopal, executive director of Jala Samvardhana Yogana Sangha (JSYS), a state government-backed society that facilitates a World Bank-funded participatory tank restoration project in Karnataka.

Reduces poverty
On June 5, Chief Minister of Karnataka, S.M.Krishna, inaugurated the Karnataka Community-Based Tank Management at Vidhana Soudha, the state secretariat, located in Bangalore. World Bank Lead Economist Stephen Howes, who was present at the function, hailed the effort of the State in taking up this project as "A means to reduce poverty."

Chief Minister of Karnataka Sh. S.M. Krishna

The project aims to improve rural livelihoods by developing and strengthening community-based approaches to managing selected tank systems. The strength of the project will be in ensuring community ownership and management responsibility, Gopal explains. It will be achieved by fostering an integrated approach to water and land management in tank systems, deepening rural decentralisation and instituting cost recovery arrangements for future sustainability.

The Word Bank cleared a credit of US $98.9 million with a grace period of 10 years and maturity period of 35 years for the project that is meant to develop and strengthen community-based approaches. The main components are (a) establishing an enabling environment for the sustainable and decentralised management of tank systems; (b) strengthening community-based institutions to assume responsibility for tank system management and (c) undertaking tank system improvement.

Karnataka government has agreed to chip in US $20.93 million and the villagers will have to contribute US $4.74 million. The project encompasses 2,000 tanks in 34 taluks (administrative divisions of villages) in nine districts, namely, Bagalkot, Kolar, Chitradurga, Koppal, Tumkur, Bidar, Raichur, Haveri and Bellary.

JSYS was formed two years ago and the Chief Minister had announced the Government plans to restore tanks with community participation in the 2000-2001 state budget. As the modalities for World Bank funding progressed, the government initiated a pilot programme on its own and put the participatory community structure in place with the help of rural and state-level NGOs roped in by the JSYS.

Old wine?
The NGO partners note that community participation, with its World Bank jargon and stipulations, is actually rather ancient wine packaged in a shiny new bottle with an international cap. For instance, a law that was in place in the erstwhile Mysore State had clear-cut provisions for the management of tanks by village representatives. The law had special provisions to ensure water supply to various user groups and to levy user fees.

"With bureaucratisation, these mechanisms disintegrated and tanks were silted up with nobody to care for them." says Gopal. Environmentalists argue that well over 3/4 of the village tanks cannot be filled to capacity without some kind of restoration. Worse still, scores of tanks have been reclaimed in towns and cities to build roads, commercial complexes and houses. Denial of villagers rights over the tanks was an historic mistake.

As the World Bank notes, about 70 per cent of people in Karnataka are dependent on agriculture and related services. And 80 per cent of rural income comes from these activities. Still, Karnataka has one of the lowest shares of gross irrigated area as a percentage of gross cropped area among major states in India. Karnataka's share is just 26 per cent compared to 52 per cent in Tamil Nadu, 67 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and 39 in India on average. "The role of irrigated agriculture (especially tank-based irrigation) is critical to increasing agricultural growth in such areas." notes a Bank document.

The first phase of tank restoration programme covers 2,000 tanks out of an estimated total of 37,000 minor irrigation tanks in the state. In effect, it would mean coverage of 72,000 hectares out of the 685,000 hectares (11 per cent) of the estimated command area irrigated by tanks in the State. Besides, the community structures being put in place for the whole project will boost participatory development and effective local governance.

Elected village councils will manage the money and the work involved in the tank restoration effort. "It's something like the panchayat-level development project implementation tried out in Kerala." points out Subramanian Murugesan, project team leader of Oxfam India, a partner NGO, based in Bangalore. "It's the is the first time the community here is getting a chance to do its own development work." he notes.

Answer to prayers as for the community and its individuals, it would mean restoration of their lifelines, an answer to their prayers. For tribal elder Sakamma, the restoration was an emotional event. "We witnessed a three-year drought when my daughter was one-and-a-half years old," Sakamma later said. "When my husband died of disease and hunger, we survived by drinking water from this tank, eating the small tuber that grows along its edges."

Tanks are lifelines indeed.


For more reading, visit the following sites :
Deccan Plateau: www.kamat.com/kalranga/deccan
harvest rainwater : http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org/
World Bank: www.worldbank.org