India’s policy on cooperation is key to creating livelihoods for all

 A two-day national conference on India’s Cooperation Policy inaugurated by the home and cooperation minister took place earlier this week. The programme was attended by several officials of the Centre and states along with other national institutes and cooperatives. Marked by characteristic incisiveness, the pith of the minister’s address was a call to usher-in a ‘movement for cooperation’. Bureaucrats were quick to draw up the achievements of their respective departments of cooperation—in a manner that showed their preparation for the mandate of the policy. Albeit useful, this missed a major point: that cooperation is not an end in itself. Cooperation is an approach, or, as the draft National Policy on Cooperatives puts it, “a preferred instrument of execution of public policy especially in rural areas". And fundamental to this approach are the attributes that describe our society in general but are amplified in the context of Indian villages. These are the attributes of community ties, collective decision making, mutual trust, shared ownership and social responsibility.

After 74 years of independence and an array of schemes to meet the basic needs of citizens, it is only a matter of logical progression that the state should now focus on creating a society of self-dependent people with adequate livelihood opportunities. And cooperation is being seen as key to this transition. From farming and food-processing to fisheries and self-help groups (SHGs); cooperatives are touted as catalysts for social and economic progress. But what does this renewed focus mean for the effectiveness of a policy? This article picks up elements of cooperation from a scheme aimed at enhancing the livelihood of forest-dependent Tribal communities to answer this question. Rolled out in 2018, the Pradhan Mantri Van Dhan Yojana (PMVDY) leverages the traditional knowledge of Tribal communities to harvest forest produce and strengthen their market linkages. Central to its operations is a Van Dhan Vikas Kendra (VDVK). It is a Tribal-owned centre that undertakes aggregation, processing and packaging of forest produce for sale. The functioning of the scheme hinges on the attributes of cooperative existence.

The first step in cooperation is to bear in mind the affinity among members while setting up VDVKs. With mutual trust and a certain degree of affiliation among members, VDVKs can survive the initial cycles of loss and may continue to exist even after the state pulls out support.

A promising demonstration of this is seen in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, where a group of 200 women have created a market for neem pesticides with their coordinated action. These women lost their first batch of produce to the rains. Starting out slow, they manufactured pesticides and used them in their own farms initially. Promising results prompted much buy-in from others. Today, all the farmer groups in the area buy this organic pesticide from that VDVK.

In yet another VDVK, in Jharkhand, the women said that they were amazed to see the quantum of forest produce that they collectively procured. Earlier, they would sell these products individually and make do with prices fixed by their buyers. As they have started aggregating products now, their negotiating power has also increased. “The traders now come to us to buy mahua flowers, karanj and imli instead of us having to go to them," exclaimed the president of the kendra.

Cooperation also entails convergence. In some VDVKs in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, training for beneficiaries is being conducted in convergence with other schemes like the Entrepreneurship and Skill Development Programme or the Samarth Yojana. As beneficiaries bring home more money, their social standing also improves, reckon women in Kondagaon district of Chhattisgarh. “My husband would not let me participate in the SHG meetings earlier but now drops me off at the kendra every day at 9am," one of them said.

Finally, the autonomy of these cooperatives, which finds mention in the draft policy, is critical to their survival. In the case of VDVKs, the community is free to procure non-timber forest produce for sale. Communities that have control over forests also understand the limitations and requirements of sustainable harvesting. Without community-based forest rights, the sustenance of the scheme would be jeopardized. Recognizing this, Odisha held several meetings of forest officials with community members right at the planning stage, so as to ensure their support later on.

The PMVDY offers a classic example of how the cooperative spirit can be harnessed for social fulfilment and economic growth. This is not to say that cooperatives are not susceptible to failure, inefficiency or corruption. But the multiplier effect created by the success of a few kendras in terms of families empowered and forests preserved would offset the cost of failure of many others. And with enough successful kendras, a cleaner, rule-based and more efficient system would eventually develop. It is yet to be seen how India’s cooperation policy is eventually realized in practice. But schemes such as the PMVDY show that it does offer hope and merits our attention.

Sakshi Abrol is a policy manager at Nation First Policy Research Centre

Source: Mintepaper, 19/04/22

Transforming livelihoods through farm ponds

They can be an effective tool for rainwater harvesting

With an increased variability of monsoons and rapidly depleting groundwater tables, large parts of India are reeling under water stress. A number of peninsular regions like Bundelkhand, Vidarbha and Marathwada have been facing recurring drought-like situations. Given the enormity of the crisis, at a recent NITI Aayog meeting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi explicated the need to implement innovative water management measures, stressing particularly the importance of rainwater harvesting both at the household and community levels. Here, one intervention that has been tried out in various States, and perhaps needs to be taken up on a bigger scale, is the construction of farm ponds.

Farm ponds can be cost-effective structures that transform rural livelihoods. They can help enhance water control, contribute to agriculture intensification and boost farm incomes. However, this is possible only if they act as rainwater harvesting structures and not as intermediate storage points for an increased extraction of groundwater or diversion of canal water. The latter will cause greater groundwater depletion and inequitable water distribution.

In a recent study on farm ponds in Jharkhand and West Bengal, we found that they aided in superior water control through the harvesting not just of rainfall but also of surface run-off and subsurface flows. Some of them functioned exclusively as recharge points, contributing to groundwater replenishment. They also helped in providing supplemental irrigation in the kharif season and an enhanced irrigation coverage in rabi. The yield of paddy, the most important crop in kharif, stabilised, thus contributing to greater food security.

Retention of water

Farm ponds retained water for 8-10 months of the year; thus farmers could enhance cropping intensity and crop diversification within and across seasons. The area used to cultivate vegetables and other commercial crops also increased. Further, figures indicated that the ponds were also a financially viable proposition, with a fairly high Internal Rate of Return, of about 19%, over 15 years.

However, in parts of peninsular India, the idea of a farm pond as an in-siturainwater harvesting structure has taken a complete U-turn. Here, some of them are benefiting farmers at an individual level, but not contributing to water conservation and recharge. They are being used as intermediate storage points, accelerating groundwater depletion and increasing evaporation losses as the groundwater is brought to the surface and stored in relatively shallow structures.

Need for inlet, outlet provisions

In Maharashtra, the State government is promoting farm ponds under a flagship programme that aims to dig over one lakh structures by offering a subsidy of up to ₹50,000 per farmer. However, most of them are being constructed without inlet and outlet provisions and their walls are raised above the ground level by only a few feet. They cannot arrest the excess run-off as there is no inlet, and therefore they cannot be used effectively for rainwater harvesting. Further, farmers line them at the bottom with plastic, restricting seepage and converting the ponds into intermediate storage points.

Such farm ponds have an adverse impact on the water tables and accelerate water loss. The usual practice here is to lift water from a dug well and/or a borewell, store it in the pond and then draw it once again to irrigate the fields, often using micro-irrigation. While offering secure irrigation facility, this intensifies competition for extraction of groundwater from the aquifer, which is a common pool resource.

In such cases, in the command area of the irrigation project, farmers fill up their farm ponds first when the canal is in rotation and then take it from the pond to the field. This can impede circulation of water.

During canal rotation, the aquifer will get recharged because of the return flow of water coming from the irrigated fields. This return flow benefits all, as most of the farmers access water though wells in this command. But if canals fill up the farm ponds first, it restricts their benefits only to the pond owners and, in the long term, reduces the overall return flow at the system level.

Overall, farm ponds can act as effective harvesting structures and also yield healthy financial returns. But if they are promoted merely for on-farm storage of groundwater and canal water, they could accelerate, rather than reduce, the water crisis in the countryside.

Nirmalya Choudhury works with VikasAnvesh Foundation. Sachin Tiwale teaches at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Source: The Hindu, 1/08/2019