Twenty-six check dams renovated, and the water table rose 5.73 feet

A check dam that has silted up stops being a check dam. The wall still stands, the structure still appears on somebody’s list of assets, and the storage behind it is gone.

Twenty-six of them were renovated this year across 139 villages of Gondal, Kotda Sangani and Jasdan — desilting, spillway repair, and deepening the bed behind the wall. Between them they hold roughly 10 lakh cubic metres.

The number that matters afterwards is not the volume but what happens in the wells. Across the project villages the groundwater table rose by an average of 5.73 feet.

That shows up on the farm as irrigated area. Before the work, an average farm here irrigated 12.41 bigha; after it, 16.02. Crop yield went from 19.7 to 22.82 maund per bigha, and net profit rose by ₹4,664 per bigha.

Alongside the dams, 37 farmers were supported with sprinkler and drip irrigation across 48.85 hectares, and farm outlet structures went into 14 villages, covering 306.4 hectares for soil conservation.

Deepening an existing structure is unglamorous next to building a new one. It is also cheaper, faster, and usually the higher-return choice — the hard part, the wall, was built years ago.