The National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA), a well-conceived initiative of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to rev up agriculture in the country's 60 per cent rain-dependent farm land where poverty abounds, seems to have come a cropper. Though announced by him in his Independence Day address in 2005 and notified over a year later in November 2006, the authority is yet to become fully functional, being caught in the war of turf between the ministries engaged in soil and water conservation work and, more so, within the agriculture ministry itself.

No department seems willing to concede any right, far less the authority, to the NRAA to allow it to do anything on its own. Till today, therefore, the NRAA does not have a well-defined status, mandate, powers and mode of operation. Instead of being a body that was supposed to coordinate all the rainwater management related activities of different ministries and ensure their convergence for the ultimate benefit of the rainfed farming, the NRAA appears to have become an unwanted appendage of the agriculture department. Consequently, it neither has adequate staff nor funds to do its work.

A case in point could be the way it was denied access to even the funds allocated for it in the budget for 2007-08. Though a specific provision of Rs 100 crores was made for this new entity, nearly Rs 98.5 crores were cornered by the agriculture department for its own rainfed area development programme (RADP), leaving paltry Rs 1.5 crores for the NRAA. Why the RADP was not transferred to the NRAA remains unexplained till now.

Worse still, the authority could not spend even the tiny sum left for it, chiefly because it had to seek the agriculture department's permission for every proposal and that was not readily forthcoming.

Besides, though 52 posts of officials have been sanctioned for the NRAA, less than 10 have actually been filled up and that, too, mostly by re-deploying officials from the agriculture department. Since these officials continue to draw their salaries from their parent department, they cannot, therefore, be expected to be loyalty to the authority.

Indeed, the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture has taken note of some of these developments and has expressed disquiet over the neglect of the rainfed areas which is a major cause for the resentment among lakhs of people and the spread of Naxalism.

Indeed, the rainfed agriculture is likely to remain critical as over half of the country's cultivated land may remain rain-reliant even after exploiting all potential sources of irrigation. At present, water management related activities are being undertaken by several ministries, notably agriculture, rural development, water resources and environment and forests. In fact, the rural development ministry has the maximum funds for this purpose. Most of the works being carried out under the national rural employment guarantee programme, too, are related to rainwater management. However, none of these ministries, barring agriculture to some extent, has the necessary technical expertise for designing rainwater management programmes – a lacuna which a technically competent body like the NRAA was supposed to cover.

It may be recalled that most of 36 or so authorities, boards and commissions set up by the government till now enjoy considerable autonomy and flexibility in their functioning. In the case of the NRAA, too, the Prime Minister had stated at the time of its formation that this national body should have requisite degree of independence. But that is far from the case.

Indeed, though the proposal for constituting the NRAA had rightly envisaged that it should be headed by a technical person as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with a full-fledged secretary rank, this well-intended stipulation seems to have become the NRAA's bane. For, the secretary rank, deemed by the IAS officials as their exclusive privilege, given to the non-IAS CEO of the NRAA has not gone down well with the bureaucracy. This seems to be coming in the way of the NRAA getting the necessary cooperation from other departments and ministries for its effective functioning.

In view of all this, the best course seems to be to make the NRAA either an independent body or put it under the Prime Minister's Office or the Planning Commission. Such a move alone would enable it deal directly with different ministries on an equal footing to bring about the much needed convergence in the rainwater-related activities of different wings of the government and effectively serve the purpose for which it was created.