Asian Journal of Advanced Research and Reports

Semi-arid India holds a large stock of water harvesting structures that no longer work. The usual explanations for their condition, namely rainfall, structure age, and the supposed superiority of modern over traditional designs, account for that condition poorly. This paper asks a narrower and more tractable question. Who holds custody of a structure, what does maintaining it return to those who hold it, and what does its dereliction cost the households around it? Evidence comes from the Tonk and Sawai Madhopur districts of eastern Rajasthan, an area of 11,692 km² covering fourteen tehsil units and eighteen sample gram panchayats. In this area, 240 structures were inspected on a twelve-field schedule, 360 households were surveyed, and 26 stakeholders were interviewed, eleven of them elderly residents who described management arrangements as these operated before 1980. Functionality rises steadily with the specificity and proximity of custody. Fully functional structures account for 61.5% of individually held structures and 58.8% of those under an active water committee, compared with 51.7% under a line department, 36.4% under the gram panchayat, which holds 46% of the stock, and 16.7% where custody is unclear or disputed (χ² = 13.77, df = 4, P = .008; Cramér’s V = 0.24; Cochran–Armitage trend z = 3.52, P < .001). Against the gram panchayat as reference, the odds of full functionality are 2.80 times higher for individually held structures (95% CI 1.16–6.75) and 2.50 times higher for committee-held ones (95% CI 1.14–5.49). Across custody classes the proportion regularly maintained predicts functionality almost exactly (r = 0.975, P = .005), which locates the effect in maintenance rather than in design or investment. Oral histories explain why maintenance stopped. Collective desilting was not abandoned out of civic decline. It ended because three technological substitutions, tube wells, chemical fertiliser and piped supply, successively withdrew the irrigation, agronomic and drinking-water returns that had made it worth doing. Respondents now divide almost evenly over whether the structures belong to the community (46.4%) or to the government (46.1%). Dereliction is expensive. Households in low-capacity villages spend Rs. 32,300 a year on water against Rs. 15,000 elsewhere, representing 21.4% compared with 9.8% of income, and women there spend 58 minutes a day collecting water against 26 minutes, roughly 195 additional hours a year, while holding 26.6% of committee places. In a village of 200 households, the excess expenditure exceeds the one-time cost of restoring its structures within a single year. We argue that these structures suffered institutional obsolescence rather than a tragedy of the commons or a simple state enclosure. Restoration therefore requires rebuilding a return to maintenance: free silt for cultivators, custody vested in purpose-specific committees with guaranteed representation for women, and programme metrics that count structures which function rather than structures which were built.