The appraisal was carried out by the Asian Centre for Organisation Research and Development (ACORD), a regional NGO that specialises in evaluating projects sponsored by international funding bodies like the World Bank in Asia.

According to an ACORD employee, the appraisal carried out by the agency was not provided to the World Bank for assessing the feasibility of the loan for the second phase of IWDP. Instead, the IWDP officials replaced it by a more favourable study carried out by the Hissar-based Haryana Agriculture University (HAU).

Launched in April 1990 by the Haryana government, the IWDP is a collaborative effort of the departments ofAgriculture, Forest, Horticulture and Animal Husbandry and HAU. Experts at ACORD feel that the involvement of HAU in the project had been camouflaged, lest it throw a spanner in the works of the second installment of the project.

The ACORD report shows that the socioeconomic expectations from the first phase of the IWDP, also called the Kandi Project, were far from being achieved. This has been partly ascribed to the inability of the project officials to elicit the participation of the people at whom the project was targeted.

According to the report, the project has ignored the formation of Village Development Committees (VDC) and, in the process, women were totally side-tracked. The poor again have been completely left out of any leadership or decision making process.

The Kandi area is among the most backward regions in a state more known as the country's bread basket. Its mountainous terrain and peculiar soil characteristics endow to the region a fragile ecology that presents some of the mostintractable problems, rendering the existing farming systems and technologies ineffective. This has posed a major hurdle to the development of the region.

According to ACORD surveyors, people have squarely alleged corruption and bribery, including the use of poor quality material and reducing the size and scale of infrastructure like dams and irrigation pipes. The report squarely blames the project authorities for not making the people aware of any details of the project and states.

Corruption and misutilisation of money are the bane of the Kandi project in Haryana, according to an ACORD official, who pointed out that while the project had seen four directors in Punjab, where its implementation is far better, it has continued with the same director for all the years of its implementation in Haryana -- certainly not ``routine'' in the functioning of the government.

The ACORD report suggests that the very concept of peoples' participation was ignored. On the other hand, the World Bank emphasises thatpeoples' participation is a cornerstone of the projects it finances. Take the instance of the VDCs, which were supposed to have at least one member from each family in the project affected villages.

ACORD notes that it would have been expected that a majority of (the) 418 villages whose list was provided to ACORD in the watershed area would have active VDCs as registered societies. However, as per the information given to ACORD by the department, only 50 villages were reported to have the registered societies and 50 other non-registered societies.

Even among those, two of the villages covered in ACORD samples, ie, Bagpat in Yamuna Nagar and Sabilpur in Panchkula, turned out to be unregistered.ACORD discovered that villages did not even have the concept of VDC. Its report observes, ``This clearly indicates the gap between not only what was planned and what was achieved, but also, sometimes, between what is put in official records, and the ground reality.'' Little wonder then a majority of the people andcommunity feel ``excluded'' from the process of development.

Kandi project director averred that he has not read the ACORD report. Upon close questioning, he did admit that there were many flaws in the report. ``The ACORD staff did not even discuss the design of the project with me. We could not spend more than Rs 6 lakh on a single water harvesting structure, so it is wrong to point out any lacuna in our work,'' he maintained.