Building Resilience Among Drought-Stricken Communities
Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sansthan, in collaboration with the PwC India Foundation (PwCIF) initiated a humanitarian response project in 10 villages of Hamirpur’s Sarila block, located in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. Within a year of implementation, the project has achieved drought resilience and impacted 2,025 families across these villages.
The project was implemented from June 2016 to July 2017 with the mandate to create awareness on sustainable and improved agricultural practices among community members in the project villages through regular meetings, trainings, capacity building sessions and demonstrations by the Parmarth team. The report titled ‘Reducing Hunger and Vulnerabilities in Hamirpur, Uttar Pradesh’ details the challenges faced by the community, the interventions designed to tackle these issues and the quantifiable results that have been achieved on ground one year post the completion of the project.
Said PwC India Foundation Vice Chairman, Jaivir Singh said, “We at the foundation focus on regions that have limited support from the private sector to address development related challenges by making sure locally relevant solutions are applied through interventions based on the context of communities in the region.” The project has supported construction of eight water harvesting structures which have helped save approximately 4,950 cubic metre of water to be utilised for irrigation and recharging of the groundwater.
The 10 villages were selected due to their remoteness, socio-economic background, lack of irrigation facilities, higher level of soil erosion and continuous drought for three years. With ground water exploitation surpassing 70%, these villages were declared semi-critical. The need of the hour was to mitigate the crisis by reducing hunger and vulnerabilities through water harvesting and management.
Observing the positive impact created by the project at the ground level, PwCIF has decided to initiate another intervention in the same block to address the water, sanitation and hygiene needs of village Dharaupur. In addition to infrastructure support towards construction, repair and refurbishment of toilet facilities, the project aims to make available supply of clean drinking water through installation of matka filters in every village household.
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