ADVERSITY ADVERSITY

Haryana has been a beneficiary as well as the victim of the Green Revolution. Due to over-exploitation of groundwater for irrigation, water table in the state has dropped to critically low levels. In Thanesar block, water table has dropped by almost 22 metres over the past 45 years, shows data with the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB). So, in early June, when people started demanding wage support, the block’s rural development agency came up with a win-win solution.

In Dhurala, it employed people to revive a traditional percolation pond on the village common land, lying abandoned for years. In Dayalpur, where people depend on groundwater for 90 per

Officials in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh have widened the scope of MGNREGA to include works, from levelling of land to horticulture cent of their irrigation needs, the village pond was desilted and deepened. Both the works were completed before the monsoon arrived. By the end of July, the in Dhurala had the capacity to hold 34,000 cubic metres (cu m) of water. Kumar claims that the pond at Dayalpur can harvest and store over 52,000 cu m of rainwater by the end of the monsoon season. It can then be used to irrigate almost one-sixth of the 600 hectares (ha) farmland in the village.

The pond at Dayalpur has, in fact, been selected to be developed as a model under a new campaign of the state government to reduce dependence on groundwater by rehabilitating ponds and using them for rainwater harvesting. The block officials are now busy creating awareness among the farmers of Dayalpur on how to maintain the structure, budget the

Haryana deploys labour pool to save water; Punjab replaces machines with humans