Social Processes and People's Participation in Watershed Development

The watershed approaches had been applied to prevent the depleting water and natural resources, but the experience shows that majority of watershed development programme were either ineffective or not sustainable. The successful cases are very few and scattered. Therefore the study was conducted in Alwar district of Rajasthan to know the nature and extent of social processes and community participation in watershed work done by Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS). For this purpose, 50 respondents were randomly selected from two watershed villages. The result of study revealed the existence of high extent of conjunctive social processes with CSPI of 83.90 (cooperation index was 88.07, accommodation index was 79.64 and assimilation index was 84.00) along with low extent of disjunctive social process with DSPI of 33.97 (competition index was 39.35 and conflict index was 28.58). The nature of people's participation was ‘interactive participation’ with high extent of participation (participation index was 84.53). The findings suggest for community based participatory watershed development where local people felt need, cooperate and participate in all stages, to ensure the relevance and sustainable conservation of natural resources.