UPLIFTING LIVES
HARNATH JAGAWAT 82 RURAL DEVELOPMENT EXPERT IN GUJARAT
Anyone visiting the hill villages of Gujarat’s Dahod district after a decade or so would find the landscape unbelievable today. The hills used to be barren except during the monsoons, now they have dense tree cover. The transformation has come about by following Harnath Jagawat’s rural development plan, modelled on watershed development, floriculture, lift irrigation and dairy farming. Jagawat’s missionary zeal has seen his team of 120 workers and 500 volunteers construct 450 medium-level check dams in the Dahod, Panchmahal and Mahisagar districts of Gujarat; the Banswara, Dungarpur, Jhalawar, Kota and Pratapgadh districts in Rajasthan; and the Mandsaur, Jhabua and Alirajpur districts in Madhya Pradesh, bringing much needed succour to the lives of the poor here. Many of these dams came up on major rivers, such as the Chambal, Mahi and Kshipra. In addition, Jagawat has put together over 1,000 smaller dams and lift irrigation projects in the three states. “Our work has been appreciated by the best water and land development experts in India and developed countries,” says Jagawat.
His land development programme has seen yields grow and crop patterns change across 80,000 acres. His Sadguru Trust regularly holds land development training programmes for government officers and NGOs at Chausala near Dahod. The trust has successfully planted 3 million trees in the past two decades, besides the 65 million trees planted by some 150,000 tribal households under the social forestry programme.
Floriculture has been an even bigger success, with the tribal farmers of Dahod supplying to Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Vadodara. The prosperity is visible. Over 100,000 households have seen their incomes go up from Rs 10,000-20,000 in the past 15 years to about Rs 1.5-3 lakh now.
—Uday Mahurkar
“Jagawat’s rural development model must rank as one of the best for an NGO in independent India. It is both sustainable and innovative and seeks to marshal the government’s rural development schemes” Tushar Shah, Senior Fellow, International Water Management Institute, Colombo