Sustainability Assessment of Randullabad Watershed in Satara District of Maharashtra State, India

Sustainability of watersheds being a major issue in India Kakade, 2017 proposed a new comprehensive framework and methodology for sustainability assessment of watersheds, which would also help design sustainable watershed projects. This new methodology was validated undertaking in-depth critical assessment of an integrated watershed development project implemented by Randullabad village Grampanchayat (Note 1) under the facilitation of BAIF (Note 2). Project of 836 ha area and 394 households was implemented during 2008 to 2013. The assessment was carried out to find out sustainability of social, economic and ecological domains at the baseline (2008), at project completion (2013) and five years after completion (2017-18). The indicators used in the framework and methodology by Kakade, 2017 was validated and the final framework emerged through the study has been presented in the paper. Rising trends of sustainability scores in all three domains were observed from inception to completion of project and also five years after completion. Key contributing factors for sustainability include the project design, community empowerment, post-project maintenance, governance and role of facilitating organizations.