Impact Assessment of Natural Resource Management (NRM) Interventions in India

Speaker: Ramneek Kaur, post-doctoral fellow, CSE, IIT Delhi

Abstract: With over 70% of India’s rural population dependent on agriculture, and 82% of farmers being small and marginal, the availability of water for irrigation is critical to ensuring sustainable rural livelihoods. Government welfare schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) play a pivotal role in this context by funding the creation of Natural Resource Management (NRM) assets in rural areas for the conservation and sustainable use of water. In this talk, I will present methods and insights from our ongoing research on evaluating the impact of NRM structures built under MGNREGA – one of the world’s largest demand-driven employment and asset creation programs. The scheme supports the creation of assets under different NRM categories such as bunds, check dams and trenches for groundwater recharge, and farm ponds and wells for protective irrigation. We assess the effectiveness of these interventions at both the site-level and the broader landscape-level, using satellite imagery and other secondary data sources. In our work on impact assessment of farm ponds, we evaluate the impact of farm ponds in their surrounding cropping areas, on the seasonal agricultural productivity and drought resilience across the Agro-ecological Zones (AEZs) of India, by employing the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method and the Double ML method. Our findings show that the average impact of farm ponds is shaped by contextual AEZ-level factors such as agricultural suitability, private borewell investments, and canal infrastructure. Building on this, we are currently evaluating the impact of check dams using similar techniques. At the landscape scale, we are developing a system dynamics based framework to capture the cumulative effects of multiple MGNREGA interventions and water bodies. This approach helps model causal pathways and interdependencies between various subsystems using data-driven models, allowing for a deeper understanding of how NRM activities influence water security and agricultural sustainability. Our methods hold potential for broader applications, including assessing the impact of NRM efforts on forest conservation, carbon and water credits, and other ecosystem services.

Speaker bio: Dr. Ramneek Kaur is a postdoctoral fellow with the ACT4D research group at IIT Delhi, where she has been working for the past two years on using technology to strengthen resilient rural livelihoods. Her research focuses on the impact evaluation of Natural Resource Management (NRM) interventions, particularly the construction and maintenance of water structures in rural areas. Her work leverages satellite imagery and computational methods to evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions in enhancing agricultural productivity and drought resilience, for the broader aim of informing strategies for sustainable agricultural practices. Prior to this, she completed her Ph.D. from IIIT-Delhi in 2022, where her research focused on developing navigation and task allocation algorithms to promote sustainability in urban transportation systems. Her broader research interests lie in the use of ICT for social development, with a focus on leveraging computational methods to drive sustainability and equity in both rural and urban contexts.