Farmer’s participation in natural resource management activities: A socio-economic perspective

Natural resource management has been accorded high priority in India’s development plan to reverse the trend of fast degradation of natural resources of the country. West Bengal, one of the most severely affected states with soil erosion is also trying to manage its natural resources through various project interventions. In its one of the most droughts affected, erosion prone district named Bankura Integrated Wastelands Development Programme was initiated in 2004 to counter the natural resource depletion challenges by encouraging active participation of farmers, which is taken as the basic assumption of success as well as failure of any development programme. It was found that participation of people was high in planning and implementation stage and partial in nature (partially participated by 84.11 and 94.13 per cent) whereas in monitoring evaluation stage full participation was very less with a high degree of non participation (60.75 per cent). Monitoring and evaluation related activities were regarded as less important by farmers in terms of participation (weighted mean score 28.14) and farmers socio economic status has a strong and positive correlation with participation in various stages of project management.