•  Iniquitous supply of water between head and tail end farmers and between big and small farmers.

•  Lack of Maintenance of the irrigation structures. Water users' (Farmers') commitment to canal maintenance is next to nil. They have never been given the ownership of irrigation system nor the right to repair and maintain it. Departmental works were conducted without consultation with, leave alone participation of water users.

•  Water charges are low and recoveries are poor, resulting in insufficient revenues to meet the O&M costs. In fact, currently establishment cost of the water resources department (WRD) exceed the revenues from water charges by a large margin.

Keeping the above issues in view, the state government has taken some steps to rectify the situation. The most important among them all being the passing of the MP Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) Act in 1999 and bringing it in force in the entire State w.e.f. September 1999. This has meant handing over of the management of canal network to the elected bodies of the water users or the WUAs. Elections to 1470 Water Users Associations (WUAs) covering 11068 villagers and 1.175 million farmers were held in April 2000. There have been attempts to orient the Presidents and executive committee members of WUAs to the PIM Act thus making them aware of their roles and responsibilities. Further, water rates have been revised to increase money collection, which can then be used in maintenance. In Vidisha we are involved in the PIM project for canal rehabilitation. We took this field project after conducting an intensive study on the pattern of water distribution and the functioning of WUAs in the Samrat Ashok Sagar co-sponsored by ADB and IWMI. The project seeks to demonstrate a model of active community involvement in rehabilitation of irrigation systems and build capacity of the farmers to affect a meaningful handover of the system to the farmers' organization.

We are working on the irrigation system on the river Halali (Samrat Ashok Sagar Project) in the Vidisha district. This is the first pilot in PIM in “Major Dam”. SRIJAN is working with the community in partnership with Water Resource Department to strengthen the Water Users Association. We work with 8 WUAs covering a total area of 11,700 ha on the Right Bank Canal and parts of Left Bank Canal . Total number of beneficiaries covered will be around 6000.

There are however a number of issues which we seek to address through our project. (i) Water User Associations broadly covers command area of 2000 ha. Due to their coverage, they become non-representative for most of the villages and hence there is a need to further decentralize the WUAs to smaller water user groups to make their functioning more effective; (ii) Big and influential farmers often raise obstructions to feed their fields or open new outlets by breaking the bunds; (iii) Tail end farmers routinely get less water; (iv) Women have no role in Water User Associations; and (v) Water charges recovery rates are pretty low.

Our Work

Through transact walks and intense community work our team generates the list of repair work according to people's priority and presents it to the WRD engineers who assist in preparing technical design and financial estimates. Finally, WUAs receive money into their own bank accounts to undertake repair. To carry out repair work we have promoted the concept of “work committee” as a building block for strengthening WUA. High community contribution of 30% ensures high participation from the community. Community participates in identifying the rehabilitation work, forming work committees, procurement of material, supervising and managing the civil works.

We are now also introducing the idea of Chak Development for volumetric distribution of water. A 'chak' is around 40 ha of contiguous land irrigated from a single outlet. SRIJAN has initiated this work for three chaks. This programme will help in (i) ensuring timely irrigation; (ii) volumetric distribution of water thereby controlling wastage; and, (iii) irrigation to the lands of poor and marginal farmers having fields in the periphery of the designed command.

Future Plan

In Vidisha, there is an emergent need to promote an ethic of water use efficiency in the area. This need will become starker once the designed command of the dam gets extended under the phase II of the PIM project. To this end, we plan to promote micro irrigation technologies in the area like Wheat with sprinklers and horticulture with drip.

Apart from optimizing agriculture practices in traditional crops, we also plan to get into crop diversification with horticulture to be able to augment the income of farmers from wheat and soyabean, returns from which are increasingly declining.