MainDBNew: Community Water Banks for Drought Risk Resilience in Purulia

Title: Community Water Banks for Drought Risk Resilience in Purulia
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NWPGeographicRegion: Asia
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Good practices and lessons learned: Good Practices:
The active participation and ownership shown to the project by the beneficiary farmers reflected the atrocities endured by them every year due to increasing droughts as well as ensured sustainability of this undertaking.
 
Lessons Learned:
 
a. Marginal communities need to think water as a commodity and not as a free resource.
 
b. Community governance of natural resources and sharing of project risk and responsibility are always best practices.
 
c. Integrated approach and resource convergence is a climate solution for poverty alleviation
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Date of submission: 21/09/2017
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Activities: Action Plan i. Geospatial mapping of the area for aspect, drainage and elevation using ASTER DEM ii. Sociometry for Beneficiary selection and Participatory planning for cropping cycles & water budgeting using SWOT analysis. iii. Design-layout and structural implementation of Water Bank, Water harvesting. (CPCB 2016) iv. Water collection, allocation, distribution and resource sharing through delivery of measured volume and proven quality of water for irrigation. v. Alternative farming initiatives, revenue return and financial inclusion vi. Water accounting and runoff-estimates, consumption foot-printing against production estimates, vii. Cost-benefit analysis and reporting.

Adaptation element: Adaptation planning and practices; Capacity building; Communication and outreach/awareness; Education and training; Financial support; Impact assessment; Socio-economic data and information; Technology support; Vulnerability assessment
Adaptation sector/theme: Agriculture; Water resources; Health; Community-based adaptation; Adaptation finance; Disaster risk reduction; Gender
Climate hazard: Drought; Erratic rainfall; Land and forest degradation
Country: India
NWPDataSource: Partner portal
Description: Ecologically water is critical to Purulia in West Bengal, owing to rugged terrain and over 50% run-off loss. With the rising demand, irrigation water has become a scarce commodity in Para and Raghunathpur, two drought prone blocks of Purulia district.
 
The objectives of this intervention are as follows:
 
a. To ensure water security for marginal farmers practicing dry land farming through water budgeting and participatory water resource management
 
b. To encourage water harvesting and its wise-use through entrepreneurial water-stewardship in rural areas
 
c. To enunciate a right-based water-banking paradigm for climate adaptive conservation of resources and sustainable intensification of ecosystem services.
 
Water banking is a new practice of forgoing water deliveries during certain periods and banking either the right to use the forgone water in the future, or saving it for someone else to use in exchange for a fee or delivery in kind. Present intervention achieved water security for 700 farmers through right-based entrepreneurial water conservation that lease water resources between willing water-rights holders and willing-to-pay users and assured quality water supply in budgeted volume. This includes harvesting of rainwater and run-off collected in built water banks for sustainable and budgeted usage in dry land farming. 10 units of water-banks, with an average area of 0.5 hectare, are developed for sustaining climate adaptive farming practices in 100 hectare of medium of extreme drought prone area.
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Further information: For this endeavour, SAFE received APN-GCR ‘Mitra Award’ 2017
NWPGeographicScope: Local
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NWPInformationType: Case study
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NWPPartner: South Asian Forum for Environment
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Target group: Communities
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NWPOutcome: a. Water banking and budgeted use along with participatory crop planning has increased the crop production almost by 2-folds.
 
b. Entrepreneurial water partnership of 50 youth established as ‘joint liability groups’ for water-banking and watershed management in 10 water bank units.
 
c. Assured water and food security to 500 plus households (nearly 3000 marginal farmers) securing an average income of USD 80 per month. This is 57.14% growth over 5 years.
d. Water foot-printing during the three years of intervention was done following FAO methodology (http://www.fao.org/docrep/u5835e/u5835e04.htm). The results show that there is a sharp decline in the gross irrigation need (SNgross) both in summer and winter cropping period reducing the water footprints by 43-47% on an average.
 
e. 5 rural indigenous villages brought within sustainable watershed conservation and management program towards inclusive growth.
 
f. sustainable intensification of ecosystem services
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NWPReferences: http://www.safeinch.org/water-bank

Implementing partners: The Project was implemented by SAFE with support from Rarhbhum Farmer’s Federation, Purulia. The farmers’ federation was actively involved in building this model and also holds equal onus in maintaining this initiative.
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Created at 10/10/2018 14:30 by Serkant Samurkas
Last modified at 10/10/2018 14:30 by Serkant Samurkas
 
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