investments . This leads to improper watershed management . ( c ) Equitable benefit sharing of watershed management within the farming communities as well as within the different locations of watershed is a huge problem . Generally , women , marginal farmers and landless labourers gain very little or nothing at all from the watershed management activities . ( d ) Several case studies in water scarce states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India have showed that unplanned overdevelopment of water harvesting structures in the upstream portion of watersheds had significantly reduced the inflows into the downstream reservoirs . ( e ) On the other hand without considering the river basin development approach it is noticed that building of large reservoirs resulted in the submergence and hardship in the upstream parts and benefits for people in the downstream parts of the same watershed or a neighbouring watershed generally having an urban or an industrial area . ( f ) Many a times , common community / village lands do not get treated adequately and revegetation does not take place as expected in spite of the watershed management programs . As a result of this , domestic / ecosystem water needs and livestock water / fodder needs are either inadequately addressed or are made to suffer due to increased water withdrawals by other uses or
Newsletter No . 65 ; IRBMS due to overgrazing . ( g ) Problems exist or new problems crop up due to improper understanding of the interaction between biophysical and socio-economic processes in watershed management . ( h ) Conflict among various government departments such as those related to agriculture [ with emphasis on food production ], rural development [ with emphasis on employment generation & poverty alleviation ], forests [ with emphasis on maintaining biodiversity & wildlife ], ( i ) Conflict between Executives and elected representatives to control funds without accountability , is a major problem in watershed management programs . ( j ) A reason behind this lack of understanding is that evaluations of watershed programs and data collection by different agencies and third parties to date have lacked rigor and consistency . ( k ) Additionally , evaluations of programs have tended to describe changes in key indicators and provide project narratives , rather than a review of the economic costs and benefits and the distribution of costs and benefits across all beneficiaries . ( l ) It is difficult to conduct watershed impact assessment studies meaningfully for lack of baseline data for monitoring and comparison of the current conditions . ( m ) Majority of the cases the whole exercise of
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Integrated River Basin Management Society