Sukhomajri Hill Resource Management Society — Watershed PES for Sukhna Lake (India)

Sukhomajri is a small village in the Shivalik foothills of Haryana, within the catchment feeding Chandigarh's artificial Sukhna Lake. Deforestation and uncontrolled grazing through the 1970s caused heavy erosion upstream, rapidly silting the lake that the city depended on.

From 1976, India's Central Soil & Water Conservation Research & Training Institute (CSWCRTI) worked with villagers to build small earthen check dams that captured rainwater for irrigation while cutting runoff into the lake below. In 1980, villagers formalised the Hill Resource Management Society (HRMS) — a community institution that allocated irrigation water rights by household, charged water-user fees, sold bhabbar grass (used in papermaking) and leased fishing rights, then used the income to maintain the dams and fund village development. It became one of the earliest institutionalised 'avoided-cost' watershed PES arrangements: the city avoided lake-dredging costs in exchange for financing upstream conservation.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, sediment yield into Sukhna Lake fell an estimated 95%, saving Chandigarh roughly US$200,000 per year in dredging (about US$2 million cumulatively). Annual runoff dropped from around 30% to under 7% of rainfall, and soil loss fell from about 150 t/ha/year to roughly 1 t/ha/year. Household incomes in the village rose by around half between 1979 and 1984, and wheat and maize yields multiplied several-fold, making Sukhomajri one of the most widely cited participatory-watershed case studies in Indian development economics.

Investigative reporting by Down To Earth in 2018 found the model had substantially deteriorated: three of the four check dams had silted up, the command area of the remaining dam shrank from 20 ha to 6 ha, cultivated area fell from 51 ha (1999-2000) to just 16 ha, groundwater dropped from 42 m to 55 m below ground, HRMS's annual revenue crashed from Rs.1.7 lakh (1996) to Rs.10,000 (2016-17), and the society stopped meeting or holding elections for a decade. A proposed bypass road has further encroached on the remaining structures. Sukhomajri therefore stands as both a foundational proof-of-concept for community-based avoided-cost watershed PES and a cautionary example of how such schemes can collapse without sustained institutional reinforcement.

Read the full analysis: https://watershedmarkets.org/casestudies/India_Sukhomajri_eng.html