Innocent Farmers? A Comparative Evaluation into a Government and an NGO Project Located in Semi-arid Andhra Pradesh (India), Meant to Induce Farmers to Adopt innovations for Dryland Agriculture.

This study contributes to the discussion on the effect of government versus NGO activities and is one of the first to compare different intervention strategies. Farmers cultivating the less-endowed dryland (not-irrigated) areas in India's risk-prone, semi-arid tropics, are confronted with the whims of nature like the unreliable monsoon and infertile soils. Most of them are resource-poor, owning small plots of land and having limited access to water for irrigation and capital, and cultivate low yielding crops. Hence, most farming households are not self-sufficient. The expectation that they would benefit from Green Revolution innovations, hardly materialized. In fact, having neglected dryland agriculture in its semi-arid tropics for decades, the Indian government implemented special projects to ameliorate the plight of these farmers only in the 1980s. In addition, various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) did the same. The present study compares the effects of two such projects: the World Bank financed Maheswaram watershed project implemented by the Andhra Pradesh government and a project implemented by a well-known NGO in that State, AWARE. Essential reading for the aid community, economists, agricultural planners, and anyone concerned with the future of Indian farmers.