Do Participatory Watershed Management Projects Guarantee Sufficient Attention to Pro-Poor Concerns?- An Indian Case Study

In recent years decentralized development approaches have been encouraged to realize the goal of poverty reduction. In the agricultural sector Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and Joint Forest Management (JFM) projects have been promoted with a view to improve service provision in a watershed context. Improved service provision it is presumed would improve access of resource poor households to watershed services such as irrigation and Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP’s). Improved access to watershed services it is argued would reduce poverty through increases in agricultural productivity and farm incomes. This paper draws on evidence from a post-project evaluation of a Ford Foundation supported watershed management project in northern India to argue that participatory watershed management projects need not necessarily safeguard the interests of poorer rural households. We demonstrate that given a particular institutional contract as in Haryana, irrigation service provision by contractors proved to be more effective than provision by a community organization in ensuring that water allocation, collection of Irrigation Service Fees (ISF) and routine maintenance of irrigation infrastructure was undertaken. Our analysis of benefit distribution from successful irrigatio