Mukhyamantri Jal Swavlamban Abhiyan (MJSA), Rajasthan

What is Mukhyamantri Jal Swavlamban Abhiyan?

Mukhyamantri Jal Swavlamban Abhiyan, usually shortened to MJSA and read in Hindi as मुख्यमंत्री जल स्वावलंबन अभियान, is the Government of Rajasthan's water self-sufficiency campaign. The idea behind it is simple and it is the same idea that carries into the state's current water programme: catch rainwater where it falls, store it in structures the village can maintain, and let it recharge the groundwater that Rajasthan actually lives on.

The scale of the problem is what makes the campaign necessary. According to the Watershed Development and Soil Conservation Department, Rajasthan is the largest state in the country at 343 lakh hectares, of which only 168 lakh hectares is fit for cultivation and 101 lakh hectares is barren. The state holds 10.4 percent of India's geographical area but only 1.16 percent of its available water. Annual rainfall runs from about 100 mm in the west to about 900 mm in the south-east, and in a typical five-year run three years are drought affected. When high-intensity rain does fall, most of it runs off unused in the absence of storage, which is exactly the gap a harvesting campaign fills.

MJSA is delivered as works, not cash. No cheque reaches a household. What reaches a village is a set of physical structures; trenches, farm ponds, mini percolation tanks, khadins, johads, tankas, small anicuts and earthen check dams, plus repair and strengthening of the minor irrigation works that already exist.

Who benefits, and who is not eligible?

Who benefits:

• Residents, farmers and livestock keepers of the villages selected into a project cluster in each block.
• Farmers on whose land a farm pond, trench or field bund is built, with their consent.
• The village as a whole, through a higher water table and drinking water sources closer to home.

Who cannot apply:

• Individuals cannot apply for a personal grant or a cash benefit. There is no citizen application form for MJSA, and any person or agent who offers to "get your name added" for a fee is running a fraud.
• Villages outside the selected cluster in a block are not eligible in that phase. They come into consideration when the next phase's selection is made.
• A single household cannot get a structure built on demand outside the Detailed Project Report approved for the cluster.

The one route by which an outside party can influence selection is financial and it is formalised. An institution — an industry or company, a CSR body, NABARD, a religious trust, a social organisation, or funds routed through MP or MLA local area development, BADP, TFC, FFC, TAD or DMF, that brings at least Rs 1 crore, or 50 percent of the cost of works proposed from the state budget under the DPR, whichever is higher, can have an additional watershed of its suggestion selected, on written consent.

How are villages selected for water conservation works?

1. One project cluster of roughly 5,000 to 8,000 hectares is identified in each block of the state. All 295 panchayat samitis are covered.
2. Where a macro or micro watershed is already delineated, the cluster follows the ridge to valley watershed concept instead of revenue boundaries, so that the treatment starts at the top of the catchment and works down.
3. In the first phase, District Collectors selected roughly 4,000 villages identified in 2018-19 where such work had not been done before.
4. Additional clusters are added where an institution meets the Rs 1 crore or 50 percent contribution test described above.
5. Within the cluster, individual villages are ranked and selected on marks against fixed criteria.
6. A Detailed Project Report is prepared for the cluster, and works are then sanctioned to the line departments that will execute them.

Each phase runs for two years. The phased approach began in 2019-20 under the state's current water conservation programme, Rajiv Gandhi Jal Sanchay Yojana, for which detailed guidelines were issued on 20 August 2021.

What work is actually done in a selected village?

The department groups the activities into two heads.

Catchment area treatment, which is the bulk of the work: trenches, farm ponds (खेत तलाई), mini percolation tanks, khadins, johads, tankas, small anicuts, earthen check dams and other water storage structures. These are chosen to suit the slope and soil of the site rather than applied uniformly.

Minor irrigation repair, meaning the repair, renovation and strengthening of existing minor irrigation schemes that have silted up or breached. Restoring an old structure is usually cheaper per unit of storage than building a new one, which is why it sits alongside new construction.

Alongside the structures, the programme carries two softer objectives that the department states explicitly: creating awareness about water conservation, and dense plantation to increase green cover in the state.

How is the money brought together?

The distinctive feature of this campaign is convergence rather than a single budget line. The department describes it as effective convergence of the financial resources available in the various central and state schemes running in Rajasthan, coordinated across line departments, with additional money from the corporate sector, religious trusts, social organisations and non-government organisations, public contribution, and a separate state budget provision.

The departments whose schemes are converged are named: Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Forest, Water Resources, Public Health Engineering, Agriculture and Horticulture, and Watershed Development and Soil Conservation.

Who supervises the work?

Four committees sit above the programme, one at each level of administration:

1. A state level committee chaired by the Chief Secretary.
2. A district level committee chaired by the District Collector.
3. A block level committee chaired by the Sub-Divisional Officer.
4. A gram panchayat level committee chaired by the concerned sarpanch.

Every work is geo-tagged, and implementation is reviewed through a mobile application. For a villager, the practical consequence is that a structure recorded as built has a location and a photograph attached to it, which is what makes a complaint about a missing or half-built structure worth filing.

How to apply for a water conservation work in your village

There is no individual application form and no cash benefit to claim. What a villager can do is get a work placed on the cluster's list, and what an institution can do is fund a watershed. Both routes run through committees:

1. Take the demand to your gram panchayat level committee, chaired by the sarpanch. This is the committee that records what the village wants and feeds it into the cluster's Detailed Project Report.
2. If the village is inside a selected cluster but a sanctioned work has not been done, raise it with the block level committee under the Sub-Divisional Officer.
3. For an unresolved complaint about quality, measurement or a work shown as complete that does not exist on the ground, approach the District Collector, who chairs the district level committee, and quote the geo-tagged work.
4. A company, trust or CSR body wanting to fund a watershed should write to the District Collector with its written consent and the amount it will spend.

What readers should know about the current status

Rajasthan's village water conservation effort is a continuing line of work rather than a single closed scheme. MJSA established the model, cluster selection, convergence of departmental budgets, community and corporate contribution, and geo-tagged monitoring. From 2019-20 the state carried that model forward under Rajiv Gandhi Jal Sanchay Yojana, whose guidelines of 20 August 2021 are the current operating document and which covers all 295 panchayat samitis in phases of two years each.

A reader searching for MJSA is almost always looking for one of three things: how to get a structure built in their village, whether there is money to be claimed, or who to complain to. The answers are, respectively, through the gram panchayat committee into the cluster DPR; no, there is no individual cash benefit; and the block and district committees named above.