Yamunanagar DFO M.S Malik (extreme right) and range forest officer Randhir Singh (2nd from right) have a word with villagers about the working of Salehpur Dam. |
Salehpur (Yamunanagar)
With no takers for this land at Rs 50,000 per acre four years ago, there are no sellers today even at Rs 10 lakh an acre in this small village located in the foothills of the Shivaliks. A dam small water harvesting dam constructed in less than 40 days and declared ready for use in this April has changed the fate of thirty odd families and checked their migration to nearby cities.
Most of these families at Salehpur own less than three acres each out of the 300 odd acres of village land. But with adequate and continuous water supply at Rs 20 per hour, the village has managed to reclaim another 20 acres of waste land and is now experimenting with sowing paddy and sugarcane. Earlier they were confined to corn and bajra that did not help them tide over for more than a month, forcing them to work outside.
“Today, most villagers find it hard to cope with the extensive amount of farming work on their own and are happy to pay labour to help them take care of the farms. We have see prosperity in the real sense and realise how water can change lives”, says Jagdish Chand, a member of the Village Forest Committee.
Salehpur is not the only village that has benefited from the construction of these small dams costing about Rs 50 lakh each. There are 28 Water harvesting dams constructed in Shivaliks over the years, which provide round the year water to hundreds of villages that have no constant supply of electricity and find it impossible to use water pumps for agriculture.
Since the early 1980s the Haryana Forest Department has been in the process of rehabilitating the highly eroding Shivalik foothills in northern Haryana through a new community - oriented approaches where these dams have been built with the help of the locals, who have directly benefited from the efforts.
M.S Malik, District Forest Officer Yamunanagr feels “The traditional forest management practices miserably failed because these did not provide local villagers with fuelwood, fodder and other basic needs. The destruction of vegetation, soil erosion and general land degradation assumed alarming proportions. With construction of these small dams, the farmers have been provided enough water to cultivate anything they want”.
An early model developed in Sukho-Majri village demonstrated that the Forest Department could gain the respect and cooperation of local people by harvesting rain water for irrigated rainfed agricultural land. This model based on Joint Forest Management concept, involves the granting of fodder and fibre-glass leases to village societies and an equal share of the harvested water to every household in a village.
Kurdia Ram, a small farmer says that the village societies formed by the government take over responsibility for protecting government owned forest lands in the watersheds in partnership with the Forest Department, for which they receive a share in the natural resources. This works for the locals as well as the government.
Randhir Singh Yamunanagar’s Range Forest Officer says “People in the Shivaliks are engaged in rearing livestock, putting acute grazing pressure on the hilly watershed, and rain fed farming with common crop failure”.
Therefore the focus of various projects undertaken in this area that include the Haryana Community Forestry Project (HCFP) has been to construct water harvesting earthen dams and to protect associated catchment areas with active collaboration of the village societies.
An impact assessment of one of the first dams constructed under the project (Bharauli), focusing on increased crop and milk yields, has been carried out, showing that all costs of construction and farmer investments have been recovered by increased crop and milk yield through year-round irrigation after only three and a half years of the establishment of the dam.
