Announcements
Announcements
Annemarieke de Bruin,1 Monique Mikhail, Aniruddha Brahmachari, Jennie Barron
This report describes the results of a baseline assessment of current livelihood strategies in the Jaldhaka watershed of the Brahmaputra River Basin in West Bengal, India. The work is part of the IWMI project entitled ‘Agricultural Water Management Solutions’ which aims to analyse the impacts and potential of AWM interventions to improve livelihoods at the community, and watershed scales and assess the opportunities, constraints and impacts of the use of AWM technologies. Similar work has been done in two other watersheds, the Nariarlé watershed in Burkina Faso and the Mkindo watershed in Tanzania.
The work in the Jaldhaka watershed was done during April 2010 in cooperation with International Development Enterprises-India. After this baseline assessment different AWM scenarios were analysed. Within five villages focus groups were held with different stakeholders about their current land and water resources, agricultural system inputs and outputs, health issues and different sources of income.
The results were summarised in livelihood narratives for the three main livelihood strategies: Agriculture, those with off-farm income, and independent tea growers. These were presented at an expert meeting aimed to identify the livelihood strategies across the watershed grounded in detailed village level narratives. Participants mapped and discussed the current situation of water management, livelihoods and resilience of different livelihood groups. The participants worked in a part or throughout the watershed, some of which were involved in extension services, health care and finance. Others worked in the irrigation and agriculture government departments of Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri administrative districts.
This document was developed under the Agricultural Water Solutions (AgWater Solutions http://awm-solutions.iwmi.org/) project coordinated by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in partnership with SEI, FAO, IFPRI, IDE and CH2MHill. We thank the local communities, experts and IDE-India for facilitating and contributing to the development of this work. This work was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Read the full project report (870 kB)
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