Every drop counts

In drought-prone Marathwada region, 14 villages have managed to counter water shortage by budgeting the resource

- NIDHI JAMWAL

SHARDA AGALE cannot forget the days when she had to walk several miles multiple times a day to fetch drinking water.

Her village Kotha Jahangir is in Jalna district of Maharashtra's Marathwada region-a semi-arid landscape with recurring droughts.

Water tankers supplied water to the village from January till the monsoon arrived in June. Though Sharda and her husband owned over 2 hectares (ha), they were forced to migrate in search of work during the rabi (winter) crop season because there was no water to irrigate the land. Same was the story in almost all the 350 households of the village.

That was a decade ago. Now, a variety of kharif (monsoon) and rabi crops flourish in the village.

When Down To Earth visited Kotha Jahangir in August 2024, its farms were lush with soybean, chilli, cotton, groundnut, maize, tomato, ladyfinger, brinjal and green chillies that are exported to Bangladesh.

The remarkable transformation is the result of water budgeting introduced around 2014.

"Twice a year, the residents of Kotha Jahangir do water budgeting to ensure crop cultivation is in tune with the amount of water available, both through rainfall and groundwater. It is like the grocery budget or the monthly household budget we prepare to ensure we do not overspend," says Shyam Padulkar, regional manager in Aurangabad division of Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR), a Pune-based nonprofit involved in training farmers on water stewardship and water budgeting. "In May, water budgeting is done for the kharif season, and the exercise is repeated in October when water budgeting is done for the rabi season," he adds.

The village has formed a 17member Village Water Management Team that carries out the budgeting with participation from all the villagers, including the 30 landless families in the village. The committee has 5-6 gram TH panchayat members, an ex-sarpanch and five womНо en members.