Family Trees

A Rajasthan village’s watershed-management plan promotes gender equality

- SMITA PRANAV KOTHARI

Shyam Sunder Paliwal was the sarpanch of Piplantri, a village in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, between 2005 and 2010. His father helped a marble company establish a unit in the village. In return, the company let his family sell its scrap marble, making them affluent. Over the years, excessive marble mining and sporadic droughts caused a severe depletion in the village’s groundwater levels. Water could not be found in the area, even by drilling tube wells four hundred feet deep.

On 21 August 2006, Kiran, Paliwal’s 16-year-old daughter, died of dehydration after suffering from diarrhoea. Devastated by her death and recognising the urgent need to rejuvenate the water table, Paliwal launched the Kiran Nidhi Yojana, in 2007. The KNY mandates that the parents of a newborn girl plant 111 trees. The father or guardian of the girl are asked to pay R10,000, while R21,000 is collected from other villagers and philanthropists. The total amount of R31,000 is invested in a fixed deposit, redeemable when the girl turns 18 years old. The money is expected to be used to fund her higher education and wedding. In exchange, the parents are asked to sign an affidavit promising to take care of the trees and not marry off their daughter until she attains adulthood. After the wedding, the trees become the property of the panchayat, with any income they generate being used for developmental activities.

Paliwal’s biggest challenge in implementing the scheme, he told me, was “to recover the government land that was encroached.” Convincing villagers, who saw the economic benefits of the scheme, was relatively easier. The KNY is now linked to the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana, a central-government deposit scheme launched in 2015, as part of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign.