Who Benefits from Participatory Watershed Development? Lessons from Gujarat, India

The evidence from a large number of state supported watershed programmes in dryland India suggests that the impact of such initiatives has remained limited in terms of coverage of land as well as households. To a large extent the impact is confined mainly to additional irrigation, benefiting only a small part of the total cultivated land owned by a few households in the village. In the absence of any intra-village sharing mechanism, such programmes bypass a large number of households who depend on the villages’ natural resource base. What is more striking is that this continues to happen despite the increasing emphasis on participatory planning and implementation in the various watershed development programmes.