Drought Prone Area Development Programme

• The Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP) was India’s first special area programme. It grew out of the Rural Works Programme of 1970–71 and took its present form in 1973–74, at the close of the Fourth Plan.
• Its aim was drought-proofing: not relief after each drought, but rebuilding the land, water, vegetation and livestock base so that a failed monsoon no longer means a failed livelihood.
• At its widest it covered 972 blocks in 195 districts of 16 States. After the Hanumantha Rao Committee (1994) it was run on a watershed basis. At about 37 years, it ran longer than any other area development programme.
• In 2009 it was merged with the Desert Development Programme and the Integrated Wastelands Development Programme into the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), which became the Watershed Development Component of PMKSY in 2015–16.

Drought and Drought-Prone Areas

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Drought in India

• India is among the most drought-vulnerable countries. The Ministry of Agriculture puts about 68% of the country at risk of drought in varying degrees:
  • 33% receives less than 750 mm of rain a year and is chronically drought-prone;
  • 35% receives 750–1,125 mm and is drought-prone.
• On average about 12% of the population and 16% of the area are affected by drought. A severe drought comes every four to five years, and some part of the country is hit almost every year.
• Drought is a creeping hazard. It builds slowly, has no sharp onset and spreads over large areas, so it is often recognised late.
• Severe all-India droughts struck in 1965–66 and 1966–67, 1972, 1987, 2002 (monsoon rainfall 19% below normal, with unusually wide dryness in July), 2009 (22% below normal) and in two successive years, 2014 and 2015.
• In Marathwada, after the failures of 2014 and 2015, Latur’s reservoirs ran dry. Drinking water was carried in by special trains from April to August 2016.
• About half of India’s net sown area is still rainfed. Drought therefore hits food output, fodder, drinking water, rural incomes and migration at once.

• At the national scale, IMD treats a year as an all-India drought year when the monsoon deficiency exceeds 10% and more than 20% of the country is under drought.

Causes of Drought-Proneness

• Monsoon dependence and variability. Most of India gets 75–90% of its rain in four months. Where the mean is low, variability is high: over 40% in western Rajasthan.
  • El Niño years (2002, 2009, 2015) bring weak monsoons; long breaks in July and August ruin standing crops.
• Rain-shadow location. The plateau east of the Western Ghats, from Marathwada to Rayalaseema and interior Tamil Nadu, lies in the lee of the south-west monsoon.
• High evaporation. Potential evapotranspiration exceeds rainfall for most of the year, so even average rain leaves a moisture deficit.
• Thin soils and hard rock. Basalt and granite terrain stores little water; red and lateritic soils shed runoff quickly.
• Human pressure. Overgrazing, deforestation, cultivation of marginal land and the over-pumping of groundwater turn a dry year into a drought.
• Cropping mismatch. Water-hungry crops such as sugarcane in Marathwada draw down the aquifers that should carry villages through a dry year.

Characteristics of Drought-Prone Areas

• Large human and cattle populations press on a fragile resource base for food, fodder and fuel.
• Vegetation cover keeps shrinking through overgrazing, fuelwood cutting and cultivation of marginal land.
• Soil erosion by wind and water rises on the exposed land.
• Groundwater falls because it is pumped without any effort to recharge the aquifers.
• These problems feed one another in a vicious cycle:
  • drought → crop failure → overgrazing and tree cutting → bare soil → more runoff and erosion → less recharge → deeper drought next time.
  • DPAP was meant to turn this into a virtuous cycle of cover, infiltration, recharge and stable yields.
• Impacts reach far beyond farms:
  • fodder and drinking water run short, and cattle are sold or die;
  • wage work disappears, debts mount and families migrate in distress;
  • women walk further for water, and nutrition and school attendance suffer.

Identifying Drought-Prone Areas

• Identification combines how often rain fails, how much land is irrigated and how vulnerable the land and people are. The criteria were refined in stages:
  • Irrigation Commission (1972): a drought year is one with rainfall below 75% of normal.
    • A drought-prone area has a drought in more than 20% of years; a chronically drought-prone area in more than 40%.
    • It added low irrigation (under 30% of the net sown area) and the past frequency of famine and scarcity.
  • National Commission on Agriculture (1976): grouped areas by rainfall: arid (under 375 mm), semi-arid (375–750 mm), dry sub-humid (750–1,125 mm), and wetter areas where crops still fail.
  • Task Force under M. S. Swaminathan (1982): used rainfall with a relaxed irrigation test: 40% irrigation for areas below 750 mm and 30% above it.
  • Hanumantha Rao Committee (1994): used Thornthwaite’s moisture index to place each block in an ecosystem, together with the share of assured irrigation.
    • Arid blocks (index below –66.7) went to the Desert Development Programme.
    • Semi-arid (–66.7 to –33.3) and dry sub-humid (–33.3 to 0) blocks went to DPAP.
    • On this basis 384 blocks were added to DPAP and 64 transferred to DDP.
• The criteria have been criticised:
  • rainfall and irrigation data of the 1970s were dated by the 1990s;
  • block averages hide drier villages inside wetter blocks;
  • irrigation spread fast in some districts while climate grew more erratic.
  • The Parthasarathy Committee on watershed programmes was asked to revisit the delineation. Pilot work combining weighted rainfall and irrigation indices followed.
• Districts are still judged on the frequency and intensity of drought together with soil depth, irrigation, livestock density and dependence on rainfed farming.

Major Drought-Prone Regions

• State notes:
  • Marathwada has eight districts in the drought belt.
  • Bihar shows a drought and flood paradox: several districts suffer both extremes.
  • Purulia and Bankura (West Bengal) and the Chota Nagpur districts (Jharkhand) have thin soils on laterite and rock.
  • The KBK districts lie on Odisha’s western rain-shadow plateau; Bastar and interior Chhattisgarh are also affected.
  • South Haryana and lower Himachal Pradesh have semi-arid and moisture-deficient pockets.
• Two large tracts stand out:
  • the desert and semi-desert belt of the north-west, roughly the rectangle between Ahmedabad, Kanpur and Jalandhar;
  • the dry belt in the lee of the Western Ghats, up to about 300 km wide, running south to the tip of the peninsula.
  • Isolated pockets lie in Palamu, Purulia, Kalahandi, Bundelkhand, Saurashtra and Kachchh.
• Frequency of drought rises as rainfall falls:
  • about once in 2.5 years in western Rajasthan;
  • once in three years in Gujarat, eastern Rajasthan, western Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rayalaseema and Telangana;
  • once in four years in south-eastern Karnataka, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Vidarbha;
  • once in five years in West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Konkan, coastal Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha.
• Rainfall alone does not decide drought. The severest droughts have struck comparatively wet areas such as Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal, where dense populations depend on a good monsoon.

The Drought Prone Areas Programme

Origin

• Rural Works Programme (1970–71): begun in 54 districts of 13 States. They were chosen by the level and periodicity of rainfall, the past incidence of drought and the share of irrigated land.
  • It was mainly relief employment, and the urgency of relief produced many unproductive assets.
• It was recast as the Drought Prone Areas Programme in 1973–74.
  • The droughts of 1965–66 and 1966–67 had caused acute grain shortages and dependence on PL-480 imports.
  • The drought of 1972–73, severe in Maharashtra, was the immediate trigger.
  • Ad hoc relief had cost the country heavily, and planners wanted a long-term structural answer.
• In the Fifth Plan (1974–79) it covered 72 districts and moved towards integrated area development: multi-sector district plans to stabilise both production and employment.
  • The World Bank supported a Drought Prone Areas Project in six districts: Anantapur, Bijapur, Jodhpur, Nagaur, Ahmednagar and Sholapur.
• DPAP was the first programme to treat a problem area as a planning unit, the model for later special area programmes. It stood apart from industry-led growth poles and from target-group schemes such as the Small Farmers Development Agency: a third path with ecological restoration as the base of development.

Objectives

• Minimise the adverse effects of drought on crops, livestock and the productivity of land, water and human resources.
• Achieve drought-proofing of the affected areas.
• Restore ecological balance by conserving, developing and harvesting land, water, vegetation and rainfall.
• Promote overall economic development and improve the condition of resource-poor and disadvantaged households through a wider, more equitable resource base and more employment.
• Develop livestock, pasture and fodder, the main buffer of poor households in a drought year.
• The shift in thinking was from relief (reactive) to mitigation (reducing impact) to drought-proofing (changing the conditions that turn a dry year into a crisis).

Coverage

• 1994–95: 627 blocks in 96 districts of 13 States.
• The Hanumantha Rao Committee added 384 blocks and moved 64 to DDP, giving 947 blocks in 164 districts.
• After the reorganisation of States, districts and blocks it stood at 972 blocks in 195 districts of 16 States, over an identified area of about 74.6 million ha (2009–10). Earlier counts of the same 972 blocks give 182 and 193 districts.
  • Maharashtra had the most blocks (149), followed by Madhya Pradesh (105), Jharkhand (100) and undivided Andhra Pradesh (94).
  • The 16 States were Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.
• DPAP covered more blocks than any other problem-area programme.
• DPAP and DDP split the dry lands between them. DPAP took the semi-arid and dry sub-humid blocks, where drought is recurrent but not permanent. The Desert Development Programme took the hot and cold arid blocks.

Tools and Components

• The objectives were pursued through land development, water resource development and afforestation or pasture development, taken up as projects.
• Dryland farming: contour, graded and furrow bunding, land levelling, mulching, minimum tillage, seed treatment, green manuring and drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum, bajra and other millets, arhar and other pulses, groundnut, sunflower and other oilseeds, instead of paddy and sugarcane.
• Water harvesting by traditional methods: johad (earthen check dams), kund and tanka (covered cisterns), nadi (village ponds), bawdi (stepwells), surangam (horizontal wells, Keralam (Kerala)), zabo (community rainwater harvesting, Nagaland) and tanks, alongside farm ponds, percolation tanks, percolation and injection wells, deepened tanks, and drip and sprinkler irrigation.
  • They use local materials, are maintained by the community and suit the terrain.
• Soil conservation: stubble mulching leaves crop residue on the surface to cut evaporation and erosion, add organic matter and suppress weeds, at almost no cost; contour bunds, gully plugs and terraces slow runoff.
• Afforestation: social forestry on common land for fuel, fodder, timber and fruit; agroforestry on farms, with leguminous trees that fix nitrogen, give shade and fodder and cut dependence on forests; shelterbelts against wind; private nurseries of multipurpose trees.
• Livestock, pasture and fodder: improved grasses and legumes, rotational grazing, fodder banks and silage, drought-resistant breeds, dairy for steady income, and sheep husbandry, which needs little water. Simultaneous fodder and pasture cropping gives two uses from one plot.
• Restructured cropping and subsidiary occupations: horticulture (ber, amla, pomegranate, guava), changed agronomic practices and non-farm work such as crafts and agro-processing.
• Support to the poor: special help for small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers, and for the infrastructure that lets them sell and store: rural roads and electricity, markets and credit.
• Also listed: land reform, and cleaning of ponds, canals, rivers and other water bodies.

Funding and Implementation

• Centrally sponsored. Until March 1999 the cost was shared 50:50 between the Centre and the States; from 1 April 1999 the ratio became 75:25.
  • The equal share had burdened fiscally weak drought States.
  • DDP was fully central at first and HADP was 90:10 in Special Category States. DPAP’s lower central share was a real constraint in poor States such as Bihar, Odisha and Rajasthan.
• Cost norms: projects of about 500 ha. Norms varied by ecosystem (₹3,000–5,000 per ha) until 2000, when a uniform ₹6,000 per ha was adopted.
• Funds went to District Rural Development Agencies or Zila Parishads.
• States evolved their own set-ups:
  • Maharashtra: the District Planning Board;
  • Karnataka: an authority chaired by the Divisional Commissioner;
  • Tamil Nadu: a District Development Corporation.
• Scale of work: 27,439 watershed projects over about 13.7 million ha were sanctioned from 1995–96 until new sanctions stopped after 2006–07. About ₹2,837.81 crore had been spent on them by 2007–08.

Reforms: From Sectoral Works to Watersheds

Early Reviews

• The programme created durable public assets, but its overall impact on drought was not encouraging.
• The Task Force under M. S. Swaminathan (1982) reviewed DPAP and DDP. It urged integrated area development, ecological restoration and the participation of people.

Hanumantha Rao Committee (1994)

• A High Level Technical Committee under Prof. C. H. Hanumantha Rao, former Member of the Planning Commission, was set up in April 1993 and reported in April 1994.
• Findings:
  • work was sectoral and spatially dispersed: separate departments built a bund here, a plantation there, with no plan for the whole catchment;
  • allocations were small and spread thinly over huge areas;
  • implementation was departmental, with little or no people’s participation;
  • many activities were unrelated to the core objective, and relief works were not tied to land and water conservation.
• Recommendations:
  • implement DPAP, DDP and the Integrated Wastelands Development Programme only on a watershed basis;
  • treat micro-watersheds of about 500 ha as projects over four to five years, as far as possible co-terminous with village boundaries;
  • treat all land in the watershed: private, common, revenue and degraded forest land;
  • make people’s participation mandatory through watershed associations and committees, with a role for NGOs and Panchayati Raj Institutions;
  • redraw the identification criteria by moisture index and irrigation;
  • arrange regular independent evaluation.
• Its terms of reference also asked it to examine dryland farming technologies and the scope for joining DPAP and DDP with related area programmes.
• Common Guidelines for Watershed Development followed in October 1994 and applied from 1 April 1995.

Watershed Approach

• A watershed is the area draining to a common outlet. Sizes range from micro-watersheds (100–1,000 ha) to river basins. Treatment runs ridge to valley: protect the upper slopes first so that work lower down is not silted up or washed away.
• For DPAP this meant one plan per hydrological unit, drawn up with the people who use it: the core of watershed management in India.

Later Changes and Merger

• 2001: revised watershed guidelines.
• Hariyali Guidelines (1 April 2003): made Gram Panchayats the implementing agencies, in place of watershed committees, in line with the 73rd Amendment.
• Parthasarathy Committee (2006) criticised fragmented watershed programmes across ministries.
  • The National Rainfed Area Authority and the Planning Commission then issued the Common Guidelines for Watershed Development Projects (2008).
• IWMP (approved 26 February 2009): merged DPAP, DDP and IWDP into one programme.
  • Projects became clusters of micro-watersheds of 1,000–5,000 ha. Costs rose to ₹12,000 per ha in the plains and ₹15,000 in hilly areas, with 90:10 funding and a livelihood component.
  • It meant one programme, one guideline and one implementing agency per watershed, with convergence with the rural employment guarantee, the National Health Mission and NRLM.
  • DPAP ceased as a separate programme.
• PMKSY (2015–16): IWMP became the Watershed Development Component (WDC-PMKSY) of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, under the Department of Land Resources.
• WDC-PMKSY 2.0 (approved December 2021, for 2021–26):
  • target of 49.5 lakh ha with a central outlay of ₹8,134 crore;
  • costs of ₹22,000 per ha in the plains and ₹28,000 in hilly and difficult areas;
  • 60:40 funding (90:10 for hilly and north-eastern States);
  • springshed rejuvenation added as an activity.
  • The project period was reported extended to 30 September 2026. A next phase, WDC-PMKSY 3.0, was proposed at ₹16,253 crore (December 2025 review).

Evaluation of DPAP

Problems in Implementation

• Sectoral and dispersed work. Departments acted alone, so the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
• Inadequate and lopsided funds. Allocations were small for the scale of the problem and unevenly spread. The 50:50 sharing strained poor States.
• Lukewarm participation. Top-down delivery gave people little ownership. Bunds and check dams went unmaintained and failed within a few years.
• Faulty targeting. Small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers, who needed help most, often benefited least. Gains went to landowners with fields in the treated area.
• Weak capacity: shortage of trained staff, delays, poor information and duplicated effort between agencies.
• Outputs, not outcomes. Success was counted in kilometres of bunds and numbers of check dams, not in water tables, yields or fewer distress days.
• Weak post-project maintenance and an equity gap between upstream and downstream users.
• Hanumantha Rao’s committee summed it up: the achievements had been sub-optimal, and ecological degradation had continued.

Why Drought-Proofing Remained Partial

• Water use outran conservation. Recharge from watershed works was pumped out by new wells; free or cheap farm power encouraged over-pumping.
• Incentives favoured thirsty crops. Assured procurement and sugar mills kept sugarcane and paddy in rain-shadow districts.
• Commons were neglected. Treatment concentrated on private fields; village pastures and forests, the fodder base of the poor, stayed degraded.
• Projects ended too soon. Four to five years is short for vegetation and institutions to take root; few projects had funds for maintenance.
• Climate grew more erratic. Longer dry spells and heavier, shorter bursts of rain reduced the value of structures designed for the old rainfall pattern.

Outcomes and Legacy

• Durable assets: check dams, bunds, ponds and plantations that still serve drought-prone villages.
• Impact studies of watershed projects under DPAP found higher land productivity, rising water tables and less soil erosion by water and wind.
• The watershed approach became India’s standard method for rainfed and dryland development, a legacy larger than DPAP’s direct results.
• Measured gains from watershed projects. A meta-analysis of 636 micro-watersheds (ICRISAT, 2008) found:
  • a mean benefit–cost ratio of about 2 and an internal rate of return of 27.4%;
  • cropping intensity up 35.5% and runoff down 45%;
  • about 1.1 tonnes of soil saved per ha per year.
  • Results were best where people’s participation was high.
• Wastelands shrank. An assessment of watershed programmes credited the integrated development of drought-prone areas with reducing wastelands by about 8.58 million ha between 2000 and 2005.
• Traditional water harvesting (johad, kund, nadi, tanks) was revived and joined to modern hydrology.
• Labour-intensive conservation works shaped later programmes.
  • Under MGNREGA (replaced in July 2026 by VB-G RAM G), at least 60% of works by cost had to create agriculture-linked assets, mostly water conservation and land development. An older count put about two-thirds of its works in these two: water conservation 52% and land development 14%.

Drought Management Today

Monitoring and Declaration

• From famine codes to drought manuals. Colonial famine codes, and later State scarcity manuals, treated drought as a relief event. The first national Manual for Drought Management came in 2009.
• Institutions:
  • the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare is the nodal agency for drought; the NDMA issued national drought guidelines in 2010;
  • IMD gives rainfall monitoring and early warning;
  • the Crop Weather Watch Group (since 1979) meets weekly in the monsoon;
  • the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre and NRSC supply satellite vegetation indices;
  • the Central Water Commission and Central Ground Water Board supply reservoir and groundwater data.
• The Manual for Drought Management (2016, updated 2020) sets a three-step test that States must follow:
  • Mandatory indicators: rainfall deviation or the Standardised Precipitation Index, and dry spells (three to four weeks with less than half the normal weekly rain).
  • Impact indicators: any three of four kinds: crop sown area, vegetation indices (NDVI, NDWI), soil moisture and hydrology (reservoirs, groundwater, stream flow). They grade drought as moderate or severe.
  • Ground truthing: field checks in 10% of affected villages, chosen at random. A crop loss of 33% or more qualifies for declaration.
• The State Government declares drought by notification for specific blocks or taluks, valid for six months.
  • Kharif drought must be declared by 31 October and rabi drought by 31 March.
  • Relief then flows from the State and National Disaster Response Funds.
• Earlier, collectors waited for crop-cutting estimates (annewari or paisewari). Relief arrived after the harvest.

Area-Specific Strategies

• Drought-prone areas differ in rock, soil, rainfall and economy, so a single national package does not fit. Strategy must follow the region.
• Arid west (Barmer, Jodhpur, Kachchh): rainfall under 400 mm, sandy soils and strong winds.
  • Livestock, not crops, is the mainstay: silvipasture, fodder banks and grassland reserves.
  • Shelterbelts and dune fixing; rooftop and ground cisterns (tanka) and runoff farming (khadin).
• Deccan rain-shadow (Marathwada, Rayalaseema, north Karnataka): thin soils on basalt and granite, overdrawn groundwater and sugarcane.
  • Watershed treatment with recharge of hard-rock aquifers; shift to millets, pulses and oilseeds; drip irrigation for horticulture.
  • Groundwater regulation and water budgeting by villages.
• Bundelkhand (Banda, Mahoba, Tikamgarh): hard rock, fast runoff and silted tanks.
  • Revival of the old Chandela and Bundela tanks, check dams and farm ponds.
  • The Ken–Betwa river link (approved 2021) adds canal water to parts of the region.
• Eastern plateau (Palamu, Purulia, Kalahandi): good rain but poor retention on laterite, and deep poverty.
  • Seepage tanks and field bunds to hold water on the uplands; rice-fallow pulses; tribal agroforestry and forest-produce value chains.
• Tank regions of the south (interior Tamil Nadu, south Karnataka): dependence on the north-east monsoon and on tank cascades.
  • Restoration of tank systems and their supply channels, with water-user associations.

Modern Strategies

• Climate-smart agriculture: drought-tolerant varieties, precision farming, contingency crop plans, weather advisories (Gramin Krishi Mausam Seva) and crop insurance under PMFBY (2016).
• Integrated water management: Har Khet Ko Pani and Per Drop More Crop under PMKSY, micro-irrigation, revival of traditional water bodies, Mission Amrit Sarovar (2022) and aquifer mapping with community groundwater management under the Atal Bhujal Yojana.
• Technology: satellite delineation of watersheds, satellite monitoring of wastelands and crops, drone checks on plantations, geo-tagged watershed works on a national portal built with NRSC, soil-moisture sensors and digital land records.
• Livestock–drought link: fodder banks, silage, cattle camps that also build community pasture, animal insurance and mobile veterinary care.
• Gender and community: women manage water in drought households, so they must lead watershed planning; SHG networks under DAY-NRLM diversify incomes; the Gram Sabha plans local water use; the Jal Jeevan Mission secures household water.
• Convergence: rural employment guarantee works (VB-G RAM G, formerly MGNREGA) with the watershed component, NRLM livelihoods, and income support (PM-KISAN, crop insurance). Many of the aspirational districts are drought-prone.
• The lesson of five decades: drought-proofing needs a watershed plan, people’s ownership, assured funds and a cropping system matched to the water, kept up long after the project ends.