Addressing water scarcity in Maharashtra: Need for a policy shift

In the 1980s, Maharashtra played a pioneering role in promoting integrated watershed development to address water scarcity. In this post, Tiwale and Sankar contend that in recent years, the state has shifted to technocratic, quick-fix, and fragmented approaches to water management. They discuss two schemes – the Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan and Farm Pond on Demand – and recommend an integrated, bottom-up approach with science-based solutions, demand-side measures and appropriate institutional arrangements.

The Indian state of Maharashtra faces recurring droughts due to erratic rainfall, overextraction of groundwater, and poor water management, leading to severe shortages of drinking water and adverse impacts on agriculture and livelihoods. In response to these issues, the concept of watershed development evolved in the state during the 1980s, focusing on micro-watershed scale interventions to reduce runoff and soil erosion, while increasing soil moisture, groundwater recharge, and vegetative productivity. This approach was effectively demonstrated by model villages such as Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar. In the early 1990s, this progressed into integrated watershed development, which involves managing land, water, and vegetation resources holistically, and emphasises multi-disciplinarity and community participation through local institution-building (Joy and Paranjape 2004).

Despite these early successes, recent strategies to address water scarcity have shifted toward technocratic, quick-fix, and fragmented approaches, marking a departure from the state's pioneering role in promoting integrated watershed development. Though past policy experiences confirm the ineffectiveness of fragmented approaches (Government of India, 1994), these are being promoted at scale in Maharashtra through multiple schemes, with substantial budgetary provisioning. These programmes – driven by techno-optimism and machine-led interventions (primarily excavators) – ignore social processes and basic hydrological principles. Excavators are used so extensively that it would not be an exaggeration to say that, over the years, the excavator has become a symbol of tackling water scarcity in Maharashtra.

A look at the policy trajectory of soil and water conservation programmes indicates we have come full circle: from a fragmented set of measures in the 1960s to an integrated and participatory approach in the 1990s, and now mechanisation – accompanied by a shift back to fragmentation. Similar trends in many states across the country – such as Mission Kakatiya implemented by the Government of Telangana for tank restoration (discussed in Kumar et al. 2016) and Rally for Rivers promoted by Isha Foundation to save rivers (discussed in Srinivasan et al. 2017) – make this issue a matter of great concern. Although a bottom-up, integrated approach with demand-side measures may seem time-consuming, it remains the only sustainable solution for addressing water scarcity.

Lessons from the past

To address water scarcity challenges in arid and semi-arid regions of India, soil and water conservation programmes were initiated in the 1960s, including the Drought Prone Area Programme (DPAP) and Dessert Development Programme (DDP). However, in 1993, a committee led by CH Hanumantha Rao critically assessed soil and water conservation work implemented under these programmes. It was observed that implementation has been done without preparing plans following the watershed boundary and involving local communities. Such a fragmented approach led to poor outcomes – continuation of ecological degradation and shortages of drinking water, fuel, and fodder in watershed villages.

Following the recommendations of this committee and subsequent revisions, an integrated approach to watershed development evolved, which follows hydrological boundaries and treats the watershed as a whole unit even if it crosses village boundaries. Adopting a ridge-to-valley approach ensures that soil and water conservation measures are implemented sequentially from the highest to the lowest points of a watershed, involving both drainage line treatments (such as gully plugs or check dams) and area-based measures (such as field bunds or contour trenches) to reduce runoff and soil erosion, and enhance water infiltration. The approach emphasises using locally available resources and manual labour during implementation.

Further, this approach focuses on social processes in the planning of the biophysical interventions, involving institution building at the village level (for example, village watershed committees) and training and capacity-building of watershed inhabitants, including women, to ensure participation, equity, and sustainability (Government of India, 2008). Improving the livelihoods of watershed inhabitants is central to this approach, as it was discovered that mere conservation of water and other natural resources does not automatically translate to increased household productivity and reduction in poverty, especially for small and marginal farmers and landless households. Thus, an integrated approach to watershed development has organically evolved in the Indian context through extensive experimentation in policy and practice.

Shift to technocratic quick fixes

The integrated approach requires years of community engagement and careful planning, but short-tenure governments seeking quick, visible results often bypass these processes, favouring immediate, machine-led physical interventions and neglecting science-based, long-term, participatory solutions. To illustrate our point, we discuss two schemes: Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan (water-rich village campaign) and Farm Pond on Demand.

Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan (JSA): The JSA was launched in 2014 as the flagship programme of the state of Maharashtra, with the promise of tackling the drought permanently by 2019. The scheme aimed at making 25,000 villages drought-free, at the rate of 5,000 villages per year (Government of Maharashtra, 2014). The approach included preparing a village-level water budget and action plan in consultation with the Gram Panchayat (village council) and implementing the same within a year. The state government spent Rs. 9,731.3 crore on this ambitious scheme, surpassing the total expenditure of all other central and state-funded micro-watershed programmes implemented in Maharashtra (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Total expenditure of major soil and water conservation schemes in Maharashtra up to March 2024 (in Rs. crore)

Note: Other schemes include mainly Marathwada Panlot Vikas Mission, Western Ghat Development Programme, and Rural Infrastructure Development Programme (supported by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)).

Source: Economic Survey of Maharashtra 2023-24.

Although JSA mandated community participation, it lacked provisions to equip villagers with the necessary knowledge and skills for meaningful participation, or to establish inclusive decision-making institutions in order to ensure equity and participation. Preparing water budgets and village action plans usually takes six months to a year. Planning to complete this process and implementing the scheme within a year in 5,000 villages was impractical. As a result, participatory processes were bypassed despite policy claims.

Further, JSA compromised basic hydrological principles by abandoning the ridge-to-valley approach and not following hydrological boundaries for soil and water conservation planning. Instead, planning was done following the administrative boundaries of the village. This mistake was, however, realised after three years in November 2017, and the government changed the unit of water budget preparation and planning from village to watershed. Nonetheless, by that time, half of the implementation period of the JSA was completed, and thousands of villages had already followed a flawed approach.

While the scheme claims to include preparation of a water budget, this exercise requires complex data on rainfall, runoff, aquifers, groundwater variations, and crop water needs. Without adequate data, resources, or trained personnel, the process was oversimplified, producing inaccurate figures that misrepresented village watershed conditions.

Additionally, JSA followed a problematic approach to planning. The format of village-, tehsil- and district-level plans prescribed under JSA included only a table listing the type of work, number of works, and amount required, with the whole focus being on supply-side infrastructural interventions (Government of Maharashtra, 2014). This formulaic planning approach failed to understand and mention the nature of water scarcity (for example, whether for drinking or irrigation) faced by a particular village, its magnitude, or its spatial and temporal dimensions.

For instance, the village action plan of Chincholi (Khurd) village of Chandrapur district, prepared in 2016-17, included a table listing ten works: four stream deepening projects and the construction of three bunds and three cement concrete check dams. This tabular plan only lists infrastructural interventions and does not mention the nature of water scarcity, how it will be addressed by these listed interventions, and how Chincholi village will achieve the status of drought-free as a consequence.

Given these shortcomings, it is not surprising that JSA was expected to perform poorly during implementation and received widespread criticism from researchers, civil society organisations, and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) (Bhadbhade et al. 2019, CAG, 2020, Tiwale 2020a).

Farm Pond on Demand: In 2016, the Maharashtra government launched another flagship scheme, Farm Pond on Demand, to provide protective irrigation to farmers to overcome drought by offering a subsidy of Rs. 50,000 per farm pond. As per the Economic Survey of Maharashtra 2019-20, 137,447 farm ponds were constructed by December 2019.

In practice, however, the farm pond scheme took a completely different turn. Farm ponds were rarely constructed for harvesting and storing rainwater – instead, farmers began using these ponds for temporary storage of extracted groundwater. Most of these farm ponds were constructed without inlets for water¹, restricting the runoff capture, and covered with plastic lining to prevent water infiltration. These farm ponds are filled with water pumped from borewells, and open wells and are being used as intermediary storage structures for watering in non-monsoon periods. Farmers compete with each other to extract groundwater and store it in private farm ponds, thereby aggravating groundwater depletion and increasing evaporation losses (Kale and Kulkarni 2022). Thus, this programme inadvertently promoted the privatisation of what is meant to be a common property resource.

To address this issue, while launching Phase 2 of JSA in January 2023, the government placed the onus on local communities, requiring a community-level decision-making process in the Gram Sabha (village assembly) to determine the filling of farm ponds with groundwater. However, while the responsibility was shifted, these communities are not at all equipped with both the legitimate authority and the necessary understanding of complex geohydrology to execute this decision.

Ironically, even after recognising the adverse impact of such non-rainwater-based farm ponds, the state government further encouraged the construction of plastic-lined farm ponds for storing water from wells, bores, and ponds under the Chief Minister Sustainable Agriculture Irrigation Scheme by increasing the subsidy up to Rs. 75,000 per farm pond. In 2023-24 alone, Rs. 84.52 crore were spent constructing 12,254 such farm ponds.

Thus, the humble farm pond, initially promoted as one of several measures to be used in integrated watershed development for the temporary storage of surface runoff, evolved into a silver bullet to be subsidised and scaled up indiscriminately and in isolation, leading to impacts on groundwater and river baseflow and seriously undermining the equitable and sustainable use of water. Unfortunately, these concerns are either overlooked or shifted onto the community to address, without any support.

Similar to the farm pond, several other fragmented standalone measures are being pitched as a panacea and implemented with the promise of resolving water scarcity issues. For example, the Galmukt Dharan and Galyukt Shivar (silt-free water reservoirs and silt-applied farms) schemes narrowly focus on desilting water bodies, and the river rejuvenation scheme promotes the excavation of river channels (Tiwale and Sankar 2025).

In the name of rejuvenation, in 2016, the Manjra River was excavated at a massive scale, promising to permanently tackle the water scarcity faced by Latur, a city in the Marathwada region. However, after spending around Rs. 7 crore collected from people and damaging the river ecosystem, the intervention could not provide a single drop of water to the city (Tiwale 2020b). Similarly, the recharge pit intervention called Jaltara promoted by ‘Art of Living’ at scale has considerable limitations (Central Ground Water Board, 2023). For instance, the recharge pits have only a marginal impact on groundwater recharge compared to the claimed benefits, and they require regular maintenance, which is often not carried out by farmers.

The way forward: Returning to an integrated approach

Water scarcity is a complex problem, and it cannot be addressed by technocratic, quick-fix, and fragmented approaches, which have repeatedly proven ineffective. Policymakers must also resist the temptation to seek immediate, visible results at the expense of long-term sustainability. Tackling water scarcity requires patience, careful planning, and a commitment to science-based solutions. We need integrated water management – which itself must be improved to address its shortcomings – with participatory planning. Governments also need to prioritise demand-side measures and appropriate institutional arrangements to regulate and manage water resources, and facilitate equity and sustainability.

An extended version of this post was earlier published in Economic and Political Weekly.

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the I4I Editorial Board.

Note:

The scheme promoting in situ water harvesting had an in-built contradiction, as the scheme permitted the construction of farm ponds without inlets or outlets.