Viewpoint: Defeating the water crisis: Community matters!/

Community participation is critical in enhancing rural sustainability in terms of managing indigenous water harvesting structures. The long-standing illusion that the water crisis can only be tackled through a top down strategy design has been shattered by a successful community engagement model using the social, financial, and human capital of the community in the semi-arid village Laporiya of Rajasthan in India. The positive externalities created through the process of community engagement are not only via knowledge sharing but also water sharing with neighboring villages. The appropriate policy suggestion for the positive externalities so created is to build an extra market for ‘ideas’ creating incentives for these innovative practices in rural settings by allowing them to flourish in a hazard free manner, free from the risk of encroachment of common lands, or of future inter-sectoral resource conflict arising out of any industrial activity. The state-managed community participation has also been successful in reviving and creating water harvesting structures, but the sustainability of such program is at stake, in the absence of social capital. Communities do matter but in ways that sustain the local economy.