A hole in the ground to beat the drought

You rarely see rain clouds in Chittoor district of southern Andhra Pradesh. There’s been hardly anything like wet monsoons for the best part of two decades. So water shortage is a perennial feature of this area, one that saps farmers of both will and livelihood. This year has been no exception.

In fact, large parts of the country are gripped by a severe drought. But in and around the town of Punganur, there are few if any signs of strain. The lack of rain doesn’t seem to worry anyone.

The secret of their contentment is simple; it’s a hole in the ground. That is the central feature of a water conservation project that has made the semi-arid region bloom almost beyond belief. It has brought prosperity and a sense of collective enterprise to a place that reeked of deprivation and despair.

Begun in 1998, the project, piloted by the DHAN foundation (Development of

Humane Action), took two years to get underway fully. The foundation, which works with government initiatives for drought-prone regions, made two simple but major innovations in the project area.

The first has to do with utilisation of  resources. DHAN’s regional director M Kiran Kumar says a drought relief package usually means a government contractor coming in to build a new concrete check-dam or tank that costs about Rs 4-5 lakh, virtually the entire budget for the initiative. “The problem in these areas,” he says, “is that having one large village tank is never viable. It seldom fills up with enough water.”

“What we have tried to do (in all their projects) is work on existing resources rather than rely on new constructions,” Kumar adds. “We renovate existing tanks that lie unused and clear the supply channels to these tanks. The work we have done has already improved moisture retention in the soil. This allows us to explore many other supplementary methods of irrigation.”

The method they’re talking about in this case is that hole in the ground, the innovation on which the whole project is based — farm ponds for individual farmers which let them tend to smaller plots, typically two or three acres, rather than being forced to rely on a central irrigation system.

Importantly, for the construction of these ponds, the farmers have to pay 25 per cent of the cost. This guarantees a vested interest, and is DHAN’s second innovation. The ponds are usually 15 feet by 15 wide and six feet deep and require only one or two decent showers to fill up. They stay full for four or five months, replenished by additional rain and seepage from higher ground. Over the past six years, after a few farmers initially worked with DHAN on this system, the project has caught on and about 400 of these farm ponds dot the mandal. The results are obvious. Desertification of land is a regular feature of rain shadow regions. But around Punganur, in the few acres surrounding each pond, the lush green of paddy — the region’s longest running dream — stands out in glorious contrast.

In Nekundi village, B Narasimhulu took up this project and started with one pond for one acre. For this, he contributed a quarter of the cost. Five years on, Narasimhulu has acquired close to eight acres, on two of which he cultivates paddy. The rest is cash crops like sugarcane, tomato, drumsticks and jamun.

Similarly, in Peddalasapuram village, A Venkataramana started off with a smallish pond. The farmer says he now has over eight acres from which he gets at least two crops a year. Last year, he harvested about 100 bags of paddy. He even employs several people from his and the neighbouring villages to work his lands. Water in these areas is empowerment and it has always been DHAN’s policy to focus on SC/ST farmers — like Narasimhulu and Venkataramana — in a conscious effort to ensure that they acquire a voice in their village.

DHAN’s work, however, does not stop here. After ‘drought-proofing’ the area, they have encouraged farmers to organise themselves into village level associations and micro-finance groups, linked through a mandal-level federation. Besides desilting and cleaning up water tanks, and organising veterinary camps for the villages, the micro-finance groups have started approaching banks as a unit for loans.  

Their performance, Kiran Kumar says, has been excellent and banks are now willing to do business even without a DHAN person to provide support. Members of the oldest micro-finance groups have benefited immensely. The Sri Vinayaka Vayalaga MFG comprising 10 members recently got a loan of Rs 3 lakh to buy more land and expand into businesses like dairy farming and fish rearing. There are about 600 self-help groups and associations in and around Punganur. This network has reached a level of sophistication that requires frequent annual general body meetings simply to keep track of finan­ces and new projects.

Elsewhere in the state, farmer suicides seems to be the norm, but around Punganur there’s an air of quiet confidence about the future. The success of this project shows, if anything, that big change is not about pouring in big money. Instead, it is about creating assets from within — a lesson and a model that other programme, in other states even, would do well to observe.

— jayantsriram@gmail.com