Measuring agricultural sustainability-spatial evaluation of development in watershed projects

Watershed development project is a popular NRM and agriculture development strategy in rainfed agriculture. The program has attracted huge investments since its initiation in 1980s in the country. Till date, several phases of watershed projects have been implemented under guidelines that have been modified at regular intervals to adapt to changing situations. Monitoring and evaluation of watershed projects have always been a challenge. However, use of tools of Geo-informatics makes the task manageable and provides the facility to measure the immeasurable, namely sustainable development. This paper presents a methodology developed to measure sustainability of agriculture in rainfed regions of India. The paper discusses the methodology developed under IC AR National Fellow scheme which was used to monitor changes in identified treated watersheds in two districts in erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, namely Nalgonda and Rangareddy which are presently part of Telangana, a new state carved out of the former. Temporal study carried out in the selected watersheds since 2006 helped in indicating which aspects of watershed development program were critical and eventually contributed to agricultural sustainability. This information could be vital for the Proj ect Implementing Agency (PIA) that can use the information to carry out mid-term correction or undertake an overhauling of the whole project based on actual requirements in the field. Study indicated that although full sustainability had not been achieved in the selected project sites, watershed development program was found to be useful and had actually contributed positively to development of rainfed agriculture in the region.