Equipping communities to plan land and water conservation initiatives

Less than an hour from the district headquarter of Bhilwara, women in village Bavdi in Jahazpur block had to walk for several miles in the scorching heat for a few litres of water. They would queue up for long durations to collect drinking water from the only well in the vicinity. The women had to repeat this exercise four to five times a day, in order to fetch sufficient water. Further, since this was the only source of water, it was used for domestic, livestock as well as irrigation needs, adversely impacting the already-stressed groundwater table in the area.

As across the country, women in these villages were suffering till Gayatri Sharma, a young woman from the village spearheaded a community programme to bring about a change in the community’s land and water use planning. With the support of the Foundation for Ecological Security, a non-profit organisation she facilitated knowledge sharing on land and water conservation, governance and management through the use of digital tools in her village.

Land degradation targets can be met through MGNREGA works using planning tools

Access to and proper use of natural resources such as land along with adequate technical capacities to design, plan and implement proper land use plans in rural areas can help deal with the challenge of natural resource depletion. India’s social protection programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides scope for convergence with other schemes to plan for rural land use planning around improvement in land and water resources.

However, the interventions supported by the FES in villages such as Bavdi suggest that the use of digital planning tools such as Composite Landscape Assessment and Restoration Tool (CLART) can go a long way in achieving better land-use outcomes.

The android-based tool is easy to use and the community is able to prepare technical estimates and labour budgets of the proposed structures for administrative sanction by the department.

CLART, at scale

The tool is enabled to work without an internet connection. Village-level functionaries visit the locations and by using the inbuilt global positioning system (GPS) on their mobile phone, CLART guides them on site-specific recommendations for soil and water conservation measures. These recommendations are aligned with the specific activities allowed under MGNREGA and watershed programmes.

This reduces the need for experts in the field. The system allows for remote scrutinizing based on the information from the field, location on the map, CLART recommendation, photographs on the site and the cost estimates.

CLART, at scale: Key aspects

• Ease in the scientific planning process for the frontline worker: The user can easily make decisions based on the colour code provided in the CLART map through the app. The GPS will help the user to locate them on the particular colour at the field and get the recommendation for that particular location to identify the best suitable intervention for soil and water conservation. After the site selection, users can also prepare the design and estimate of the planned intervention for that location with minimum input such as dimensions of different interventions.
• Ease in remote validation and approval of plans by technical staff: The engineers or technical staff can check the plan prepared at field remotely with a vetting process available in the CLART portal using field data (such as GPS location on the CLART map, Google map, photograph for site selection and excel based design estimate). Based on the suitability of the purpose of the soil and water conservation plan, the technical staff/engineer can approve or reject the plan.

• Creates open and live artefacts that can be discovered and reused: The tool captures the GPS location of the plan made on the CLART map and google map, plus the photograph of the site and the detailed design and estimate based on the input data from the field of different interventions. These data get synchronized to a portal (server) as digital records (with date, time, location, village etc.,). These further get archived in the portal and can easily be used as live artefacts for future use.
• Accuracy at which this problem be solved: CLART provides recommendations at 1:10,000 scale (approximately) and the accuracy level is 90%. It provides a colour-coded map in the mentioned scale as an output for the site selection process.