Greening of common lands in Jhansi through village resource development : a case study

The Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh is typical of many parts of India. Trees which once covered the hills have been cut for firewood and the land is laid bare. Rain water, instead of Infiltrating the ground to improve the moisture regime, runs off in torrents, carrying away top soll and gravel to be deposited as scree on farmlands. In crop-lands yields decline for want of water, and poverty of people subsisting on such lands worsens as the population grows. To eke out a living more people keep goats and sheep and free-graze them on the hills. Naturally vegetation there has no chance of regen eration. The down-trend in the productivity of land is all too visible in rainfed rural and hilly areas. It has been a challenge to reverse the crippling process. This book describes how it was done in a catchment in Jhansi district.

One of the initiatives of the U.P. Government in developing the degraded lands of the Bundelkhand region took the form. of a Watershed Development Project in the Kharaiya Nala catchment of the district. It was taken up under the National Watershed Development Project for Rainfed Areas (NWDPRA). The main efforts in this regard were directed at improving the moisture regime of arable lands through contour bunding. gully plugging, construction of check dams and so on. The project certainly helped to improve soil and moisture conser vation and increase agricultural productivity. However, it did not address the problems of degraded common lands situated on the upper reaches of the catchment. Thus, these lands Instead of producing any biomass or improving the moisture regime continued to lose the top soil.