Background

MHWDP is a seven year long project that became operational in January 2006 and will be implemented till 2013. It attempts to break new grounds in conserving natural resources and securing livelihoods in select areas of Himachal Pradesh. With the philosophy of decentralized natural Resource Management following the Watershed Approach, the Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project is being implemented in 602 GPs of 42 Development Blocks covering 10 districts of the state. This project covers approximate 2.30 Lakh Households and 5.20 Lakh Ha land. The project is being implemented with the assistance of the World Bank and the Himachal Pradesh State Government.

Objective

Winrock International India undertook a comprehensive Mid-Term Impact Assessment of the project to chart out the progress, describe achievements with respect to the various components and assess the outcomes and impacts at the halfway mark of implementation.

Approach

The evaluation approach was designed to assess whether there is a change with respect to the situations at the start of the project, can the change be attributed to the project and what contributed towards this change. The specific evaluation objectives included comprehensive assessment of the impact of MHWDP, both direct and indirect; ascertaining the attainment of project outcomes with respect to the envisioned project purpose, establishing the incidence of change in the situations observed during the assessment to the project activities and delineating factors contributing towards the outcomes and the impacts.

A quasi-experimental (Project-Control) mix design was adopted for the study. The quantitative component comprised of household survey & synthesis of MIS information and the qualitative component comprised of Focus Group Discussions at Gram Panchayat (GP) level and in depth discussion with Key Respondents. A sample of 600 households drawn from 60 villages in 30 Gram Panchayats following multi-stage stratified random sampling technique was covered. The analysis framework developed for the study provides a comparison of the midline estimates of the project villages against the control villages. Simultaneously, it also includes the comparison of midline estimates against the baseline estimates.

Concluding Remarks

The key aspects used for the mid-term assessment were changes in socio-economic status, change in family income, area and production of crops, irrigation status, status of drinking water, fodder and livestock, change in farming practices, income and expenditure status, acquisition of assets, status of PRIs, availability of village level infrastructure and impact on environmental aspects including the man-animal conflict and Bio-carbon sub-project.

Executive Summary