The Odisha Community Tank Development & Management Society

The Orissa Community Tank Development & Management Society (OCTDMS) have been formed as a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) under the Department of Water Resources, Government of Orissa and to conceptualize and operationalize the World Bank assisted Orissa Community Tank Management Project (OCTMP) during the year 2006 and is registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 at Bhubaneswar. The project envisages execution through primary and secondary institutions from the State Project Unit to the Community Level Groups with facilitation of Support Organization.

Tank irrigation is one of the oldest methods of irrigation in Orissa. The State has 28,303 tanks approximately, including tanks of the Government and Private Sector (GoI, Minor Irrigation Census, 2001). About 4141 tanks (2015) irrigating between 40 ha to 2000 ha of land by these tanks with an irrigation capacity of 5.98 Lakh hectares are being managed by the Minor Irrigation Department. However, nearly 4.15 lakh hectares of agricultural lands are getting irrigation from these MIPs leaving a substantial gap in achieving the irrigation as designed for the state.

The major challenges in providing irrigation include the following:

• Lack of proper management of the MIPs
• Most importantly the lack of community participation

There are different stakeholders within the MIPs such as the farmers in the ayacut of the MIPs, the fisher who would do fishing in the reservoir, the tenant farmers and wage labourers working within the MIPs etc. For the successful functioning of the MIPs, it is important that all the stakeholders are taken into consideration for participating in decision making for water and tank management at the grassroots. The state has enacted the Pani Panchayat Act whereby Pani Panchayats are formed in the MIPs of Odisha by the Department of Water Resources, GoO. It was thus a state level institution had been created to carry out the restoration and renovation works of the MIPs with active involvement of all the stakeholders.