In India, an ambitious experiment in participatory groundwater management
was undertaken with FAO support in Andhra Pradesh, a mostly semi-arid
state notorious for relentless groundwater overexploitation. From 2003
to 2009, the Andhra Pradesh Farmer Managed Groundwater Systems
(APFMGS) project, involving over 700 communities, organised and
motivated by a group of grassroots NGOs to regularly monitor groundwater
levels, undertook annual community crop planning exercises, and adopted
water-saving technologies. A succession of reviews by the FAO, the World
Bank, and several independent researchers has hailed APFMGS as a model
of groundwater governance with global ramifcations. But the project closed
in 2009 and in 2012 a study suggested that all but a few communities had
abandoned the ‘best practices’ which the project highlighted for sustained
intervention, such as an improved ‘business model’, creating sanctions,
legitimacy, and incentives (Verma et al., 2012) (Box 8).