Dept of Land Resources’ Secretary reviews REWARD program with World Bank team

New Delhi [India], May 28 (ANI): The secretary at the Department of Land Resources (DoLR) Ajay Tirkey reviewed the World Bank-assisted program Rejuvenating Watersheds for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development (REWARD).

REWARD is a World Bank-assisted watershed development program that is being implemented from 2021 to 2026. The development objectives of the REWARD program are to strengthen the 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 Karnataka and Odisha.

The total budget outlay of the 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 the World Bank and the Department of Land Resources.

As a part of the third Implementation Support Mission (ISM), the team of World Bank headed by Preeti Kumar visited the Department of Land Resources and REWARD States for the third ISM to review the progress and to discuss the plan of action for the next six months.

The points discussed during the debriefing meeting include strengthening of Centre for Excellence on the watershed component which was established in Bengaluru under the REWARD program, organizing a National level workshop on science-based watershed management, development of protocols for the 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.