Institutional Determinants of Post-Project Sustainability in Converged Watershed Development: Evidence from Telangana, India

Six to seven years after closure, the watershed clusters of four Nalgonda mandals show that Indian watershed development has solved its engineering problem and not its institutional one. The works were built, the water table rose and has largely held, and households in every cluster gained more than their matched comparators. But the physical stock is depreciating at about four percentage points a year, only a third of the micro-watersheds retain the institutions, structures and hydrology that make the gains self-sustaining, and the units that have held are those where the programme could attach itself to a village institution that already existed and where the implementing agency's presence was longest and most recent. Rainfall, terrain and the treatment package do not explain the difference; the age, identity, continuity and exit of institutions do. For a programme that spends about five per cent of its budget on institutions and half on structures whose value depends on them, the implication is direct: the decisive years are the ones after the money stops, and the simplest remedy is to stay for three more.

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