BANGALORE: Even as over-exploited ground water in Bangalore and neighbouring Kolar districts has gone beyond the sustainable limit, an effort to reclaim depleted level has succeeded in Gulur, about 140 km from here, bringing cheers to farmers.

The initiative was taken up by the Jala Samvardhane Yojana Sangha (JSYS), an autonomous body floated by the Minor Irrigation Department. The efforts in Gulur village of Kolar district have resulted in the water level rising by about four to five metres.

Not long ago, a survey by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Tarapur, suggested that the groundwater being tapped in this region now had gone into the ground over 600 to 1,000 years ago. The groundwater study taken up in the year 2000 by the Mines and Geology Directorate has calculated that by 2004, Bangalore and Kolar districts have used ground water fully and there is no scope to sink borewells any further.

Ground water is classified as overexploited (where utilisation is more than 100 per cent), critical (90 per cent to 100 per cent), semi-critical (70 per cent to 90 per cent) and safe (less than 70 per cent).

The JSYS experiment, presently headed by IAS officer B.S. Ramprasad, provides a silver lining. The groundwater had gone below 11 metres at a watershed (Karnataka as 234 watersheds) in Gulur. Removing silt from the tank and other conservation methods resulted in bringing up the level to seven metres.

What makes the programme click is that it is the villagers who plan and execute the work. The scheme is designed such that all major decisions are taken by the community that derives the benefit from it. The funds under the World Bank-funded scheme are released directly to the villagers.

Consequently, people took the scheme to their heart and did a fine job. Today, the borewell yield has gone up significantly in the watershed. The yield was 2.26 litres per second in 2004 in May 2004. It went up to 3.26 litres two years later. The figures for September showed greater difference and the yield went up from 1.57 to 4.06 litres per second. Besides removing silt from the tank and building of check dams to prevent flow of silt into it, the farmers adapted better and pro-conservation methods of cropping.

This has resulted in increasing a total of 382.32 hectare-metre of ground water in the watershed. (One hectare metre — ham — is equal to 10,000 cubic metres of water and one cubic metre of water is equal to 1,000 litres of water). That is lot of water.

The JSYS has taken up 2,005 tanks for such interventions in the State under a Rs. 600-crore World Bank assisted scheme.

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