New Delhi: Ajay Tirkey, senior IAS officer and Secretary, Department of Land Resources (DoLR), Government of India, on Saturday reviewed the Implementation Support Mission of World Bank Assisted Rejuvenating Watersheds for Agricultural Resilience through Innovative Development (REWARD) program.

REWARD is a World Bank assisted watershed development program which is being implemented from 2021 to 2026. The development objectives of the REWARD program are to strengthen capacities of national and state institutions to adopt improved watershed management for increasing farmer’s 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 the States of Karnataka and Odisha. The total budget outlay of the REWARD program is $ 167.71 million over a program period of 4.5 years.

At the Central level, the scope of the REWARD program covers management, monitoring, communication and knowledge sharing functions by DoLR. At the State level, the REWARD program will be contiguous in scope to the WDC-PMKSY 2.0, and support implementation of key science-based activities and demonstrations which eventually aims at synergising broader perspectives of WDC-PMKSY 2.0 in other States in India.

As a part of third Implementation Support Mission (ISM), the team of World Bank headed by Preeti Kumar visited DoLR and REWARD states for 3rd ISM to review the progress and to discuss the plan of action for the next 6 months. After completing the mission, yesterday the team visited the Department of Land Resources, Government of India to debrief the outcomes of ISM to the Secretary, DoLR.

During the debriefing, the team felt that the progress of REWARD is on track and complemented the efforts of DoLR for the present progress and requested Secretary DoLR for his continuous support to achieve the progress as per the Disbursement Linked Indicators of the program. /BI/