P-Green Solutions: Detailed Note on Saurashtra’s Water Harvesting Movement

P-Green Solutions has released a new detailed research note, Water Harvesting and Groundwater Recharge in Saurashtra in the 1990s: A Community-Led Water Revolution and Its Long-Run Impact on Agriculture and Livestock, co-authored by Arun Pandhi and veteran water conservation engineer Chandra Shekhar (C. S.) Pathak.

The note traces one of India’s largest experiments in distributed groundwater recharge — from individual farmers in drought-hit Saurashtra experimenting with recharging their own wells in the late 1980s, through mass mobilization led by the Swadhyaya Parivar and a cluster of NGOs, to adoption and scale-up by the Gujarat government as the Sardar Patel Sahbhagi Jal Sanchay Yojana from 2000 onward. Over roughly two decades, this movement produced tens of thousands of check dams, percolation tanks and recharge wells, financed substantially through community contribution rather than government fiat alone.

A central case study examines the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) — AKRSP(I) — and its role in turning a spontaneous social movement into a replicable development model, moving water infrastructure from a “government asset” to a “community asset” through participatory site selection, cost-sharing, construction and maintenance. A second case study documents Pidilite Industries’ water-harvesting and watershed-development partnership with the Gujarat government in Bhavnagar district, including the Karjada micro-watershed demonstration.

Drawing on the peer-reviewed literature, government and CAG assessments, and farm-level accounts, the note finds that the movement measurably improved Saurashtra’s groundwater position through the 1990s and into the mid-2000s — critical and over-exploited administrative blocks fell from 41 in 2004 to just 1 by 2013 — while supporting real, if uneven, gains in agriculture and a livestock and dairy economy that the note argues is at least as important a channel of impact as crop agriculture. It is equally candid about the movement’s limits: declining site-selection and construction quality as the model scaled into a government subsidy programme, a structural paradox in which successful recharge can itself encourage the pumping growth that erodes it, and a coastal salinity problem that recharge alone has not resolved.

The strongest lesson the note draws is not “build check dams,” but that durable local ownership — communities that select sites, contribute to cost, and maintain what they build — combined with appropriate technical support and government backing at scale, is what converted a farmer-led response to drought into a landscape-level transformation of Saurashtra’s water, agricultural and livestock economy. It is a lesson P-Green Solutions continues to draw on in its own work across water, agriculture and livelihoods programming.