Harnessing Gender Power and Collective Action through Integrated Watershed Management f()r

Asia emerges as the hot spot for poverty, malnutrition and also for severe land degradation in the world. In India, the situatioll is similar as out of 852 million poor 221 million are in India and 108.6 Mha are degraded. There is an urgent need to break the unholy nexus between drought, land degradation and poverty using community watersheds to manage the natural resources such as water and land sustainably for improving livelihoods. Watershed approach is adopted by.Government of India as a growth engine for development of rainfed areas. Although these programmes are silently revolutionalizing the drylands all is 110t well. is need to address the issues of gender, equity to enhance participation and associated impact and sustainability of these programmes. Three selected watershed case studies in India were analyzed to study the impacts, the approaches adopted and most importantly gender analysis for identifying the strategies to harness the gender power for enhancing the collective action