Drought Prone Area Programme

The Drought Prone Area Programme (DPAP) was launched during the Fourth Five Year Plan. Its core purpose was twofold: to generate employment for people living in drought-prone regions, and to create productive assets that would make these areas more resilient.

In its early phase, the programme focused heavily on labour-intensive civil works — building things like check dams, tanks, and canals by hand to put people to work. Over time, the emphasis shifted. Later phases concentrated on irrigation projects, land development, afforestation, grassland development, and building basic rural infrastructure such as electricity, roads, markets, credit facilities, and services.

The National Committee on Development of Backward Areas reviewed the DPAP's performance. The committee observed that the programme had largely remained confined to agriculture and allied sectors, with a major focus on restoring ecological balance. This is a critical point: the book stresses that growing population pressure forces people to cultivate marginal lands, which in turn causes ecological degradation. To break this cycle, the programme must create alternative employment opportunities in drought-prone areas.

The textbook then lays out the key strategies for developing these regions:

• Adopt an integrated watershed development approach at the micro-level. This means treating a small drainage basin as a single unit for planning soil conservation, water harvesting, and afforestation together.
• Make the restoration of ecological balance between water, soil, plants, and human and animal populations a basic consideration in all development efforts.

The book also provides specific identification criteria and geographic spread. The Planning Commission of India (1967) identified 67 districts (either entirely or partly) as prone to drought. Later, the Irrigation Commission (1972) introduced a more precise criterion: an area was demarcated as drought-prone if it had 30 per cent or less irrigated area.

Broadly, the drought-prone areas of India are spread over the semi-arid and arid tracts of:

• Rajasthan
• Gujarat
• Western Madhya Pradesh
• Marathwada region of Maharashtra
• Rayalseema and Telangana plateaus of Andhra Pradesh …