Ajay Tirkey, Secretary, DoLR reviews REWARD Program with World Bank Team
The Secretary, Department of Land
Resources (DoLR), Government of India (GoI) Ajay Tirkey reviewed the
Implementation Support Mission of World Bank Assisted Rejuvenating Watersheds
for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development (REWARD) program.
REWARD is a World Bank assisted Watershed development program
which is being implemented from 2021 to 2026. The Development Objectives of
REWARD program is to “Strengthen
capacities of National and State institutions to adopt improved watershed
management for increasing farmers resilience and support value chains in
selected watersheds of participating States”. The
program is being implemented to
introduce modern watershed practices in the Department of Land Resources in the
Ministry of Rural Development and in the States of Karnataka and Odisha. The
total budget outlay of REWARD program is USD 167.71 million over a program
period of 4.5 years. This includes USD 115 million from World Bank [Karnataka
(USD 60 million), Odisha (USD 49 million) and DoLR (USD 6 million)], USD 46.71
million from two participating States [Karnataka (USD 25.71) and Odisha (USD
21.0 million)] and USD 6 million from DoLR. The funding pattern is 70:30,
between World Bank and States whereas it is 50:50 between World Bank and DoLR.
At
the central level, the scope of the REWARD program covers management, monitoring, communication and
knowledge sharing functions by DoLR. At the State level, the REWARD program
will be contiguous in scope to the WDC-PMKSY 2.0, and support implementation of
key science-based activities and demonstrations which eventually aims at
synergising broader perspective of WDC-PMKSY 2.0 in other States in India.
As a part of
third Implementation Support Mission (ISM), the team of World Bank headed by Preeti
Kumar visited DoLR & REWARD States for 3rd ISM to review the progress and to
discuss about the plan of action for the next 6 months. After completing the mission, yesterday
the team visited Department of Land Resources, Government of India to debrief
the outcomes of ISM to the Secretary, DoLR. During the debriefing, the team
felt that the progress of REWARD is on track and complemented the efforts of
DoLR for the present progress and requested Secretary, DoLR for his continuous
support to achieve the progress as per the Disbursement Linked Indicators of
the program.
The other points discussed during the debriefing
meeting includes strengthening of Centre for Excellence on watershed component
which was established in Bengaluru under REWARD program, organizing National
level workshop on science based watershed management, development of protocols
for expansion of Land Resource Inventory (LRI) across the country on a pilot
basis, providing LRI based digital advisory services to farmers and Exposure
visits of REWARD officials etc.
Nitin Khade, Joint Secretary (WM), Dr CP Reddy,
Senior Additional Commissioner, ISM members from World Bank, Experts of NPMU of
REWARD program and other officials of DoLR attended the meeting.