Irrigation policy in independent India has largely been a continuation of the colonial policy since mid 19th century. It has been driven by hydrologic opportunity more than by concern for spatial equity in access to benefits of irrigation.

The Intensive Agricultural Development Program of the 1960s, which was designed to make India self sufficient in food production through intensive use of green revolution technologies in selected districts further intensified the colonial bias towards public investment for irrigation development in select regions which were hydrologically most opportune for canal irrigation.

Of the Rs1,200 billion spent on creating irrigation infrastructure in India, the bulk has concentrated public irrigation service on less than a quarter of India's farmlands. A major drawback of India's irrigation and agriculture strategy has been the neglect of catchment areas and the people living there.

Prominent development professionals — notably, Harnath Jagawat of Sadguru Foundation and Deep Joshi of PRADAN — have argued since mid-1980s that a roughly 1,500 km long and 500 km wide stretch across central India, running from Dungarpur in the west to Dumka in the east, offers the unique opportunity for enhancing tribal livelihoods through investments in improved land and water care. This region, covering roughly 100 pre-dominantly tribal districts and home to more than 70 percent of India's tribal population, represents perhaps the largest concentration of rural poverty in South Asia.

For millennia, tribal communities here survived on hunting and gathering. However, much of this region is now witnessing a rise in livelihoods based on settled farming. In the absence of appropriate policy action to support agriculture development, tribal communities are increasingly been obliged to evolve a lifestyle of rain fed farming followed by distress migration. While India's public irrigation systems have left these regions by the wayside, there is a big opportunity in investing in imaginative small-scale interventions for improved water control, which can produce a dramatic impact on the productivity and dependability of tribal livelihood systems.

How to transform this idea into a pragmatic strategy was one of the early priorities of the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Programme (IWMI-Tata Programme). During 2002-04, IWMI-Tata Programme created a broad alliance of researchers and practitioners to initiate a process of learning and documenting tested and proven approaches to land and water intervention for improving tribal livelihoods, called the Central India Initiative (CInI). Under this networked research programme, some 40 studies were compiled, analysed and synthesised wherein CInI researchers found numerous cases, which indicated that sensible investment in improved land care and water control has the power to reverse the present vicious circle and transform it into a virtuous one. From the synthesis of such diverse case studies, CInI researchers evolved a pragmatic strategy which outlines how a nuanced approach to investing in land care and water control in different parts of the CInI belt can usher in India's second green revolution.

Unveiled at a seminar (Click here to read more) organised by the IWMI-Tata Programme, in collaboration with India Development Foundation and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, the book titled 'Mainstreaming the Margins' elucidates this strategy and also presents the research on which it is founded. The book recommends significant deviation from traditional tribal development philosophies. It argues that the lack of focus on tribal agriculture and livelihoods and the pre-occupation with curative and relief measures have led to the deterioration of tribal living conditions. It also points out that while tribal communities across the belt under study are in some ways similar, there can be no single blue-print for the vast canvass of agro-ecological contexts, levels of infrastructure development, varying historical experiences, social attributes, degree of exposure to high productivity agrarian systems and the level of market development. It therefore suggests a classification of the central Indian tribal homelands into four distinct tribal socio-ecologies to capture the diversity.

Those interested in this groundbreaking book may please write to s.verma@cgiar.org

The Trust wishes to thank Dr Tushaar Shah for his inputs used within this article.