UN praise for rural job plan in Rajasthan

A global report, which warned governments of major threat to food security because of erratic rainfall, has cited rejuvenation of groundwater under Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme as a success story for other countries to follow but warned against construction of big dams. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Sep 7, 2010, 01:29:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A global report, which warned governments of major threat to food security because of erratic rainfall, has cited rejuvenation of groundwater under Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme as a success story for other countries to follow but warned against construction of big dams.

A UN affiliated body, International Water Management Institute released the report on Monday, Water Storage in Era of Climate Change and has examined the recent trends of heavy rainfall and drought — terming them as a result of climate change.

Some of the solutions to adverse impact of water availability in future have come from India. One success story reported is from Rajasthan, where 10,000 water harvesting structures were built under MGNREGA to re-charge groundwater.

"It has resulted in possibility to irrigate 14,000 hectares of agriculture land benefiting over 70,000 people," the report said.

These small investments have brought a big change. The villagers are now growing vegetables and other cash crops in addition to normal grains.

Tamil Nadu had achieved similar success through a different path. Several water storage tanks, which were earlier used for water storage in arid and semi-arid tracks, were converted into re-charge ponds for underground water.

The report also said that 499 million people in Africa and India can benefit by improved water management but did not advocate construction of big dams for irrigation purpose.

"Many of the 50,000 large dams built worldwide since the 1950s are intended to store water for irrigation…There are the adverse social and environmental impacts, including displacement of up to 80 million people from their homes and disruption of the livelihoods of some 470 million people living downstream from dams as a result of altered river flows." the report said.

The report instead proposes an integrated approach that combines large and small-scale storage options, including the use of water from natural wetlands, water stored in the soil, groundwater and water collected in ponds, tanks, and reservoirs.

"Just as modern consumers diversify their financial holdings to reduce risk, smallholder farmers need a wide array of 'water accounts' to provide a buffer against climate change impacts," said Matthew McCartney, the report's lead author and a hydrologist at the institute.

"That way, if one water source goes dry, they'll have others to fall back on."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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