Impact of Watershed Development Programme: Experiences and Issues

Water management in irrigated area is quite a different task as compared to that under rainfed regions. Here it becomes essentially a component of resource planning. Watershed management programmes undertaken with the government and non-governmental initiatives have shown excellent results towards resource conservation, as well as, monitoring the use rates. The present paper applies a system approach framework to analyse the impoct of watershed management in Maharashtra. The paper gives a complete framework for such analysis and discusses If case study of the National Watershed Development Programme of Maharashtra. The impact analysis helped in bringing out the positive externalities and point out towards the minimisation of entropy in the production process. The paper concludes on a need for conducive institutional structure to achieve this.