Jalyatra - Managing Water!

A few of us friends have been working on creating a community that participates in sustainable development near Pune. The project has been put together by Sohrab Chinoy of ABC Farms who "finds river irrigated farming not challenging enough anymore and wants to now green a desert". Situated about 1200 ft. above Pune, on a hill slope overlooking the 4400 ft high Purandar fort, in a rain-shadow area (20-30 cm annual rainfall) on the Saswad plateau, our community will green a barren hill-slope by harvesting rainwater and stretch its usage through the year, build houses that are a maximum of 800 sq. ft on a 1 acre plot, use Laurie Baker's techniques of sustainable architecture and use alternative power sources such as Solar, Wind and Latrine Tank based Gas.
We have just started tree planting and water harvesting activities and I have been reading up on Rain Water Harvesting techniques. Came across a book called Jalyatra, a recent book authored by Nitya Jacob. An interesting book that chronicles traditional, decentralized, locally relevant water harvesting, storage and distribution techniques from Rajasthan to the North East and Uttaranchal to Tamilnadu.

Water conservation systems have been my interest for sometime now. First started with work I did while helping restore a lake in Bangalore in 2004 where I learnt of the system of interconnected tanks and lakes that existed in the areas of Bangalore and other parts of South Karnataka. Also observed, interesting water management systems in Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh during our recent travels. Ladakh, has an age old tradition of "responsible" water usage. The Indus river and several melting glaciers, are the source of water in the cold deserts of Ladakh. Every village of typically 10-20 houses, has "traditional rules" of water usage, where water in the main stream is not touched by the villagers. They have created and maintained "channels" from the main stream that are brought into the fields and the village. All water is drawn from these channels for use in the fields and in the house. Villagers with fields at the top of the slope, divert the main channel into their barley fields and then "call out" to their downstream neighbours when they are done with watering their fields. Water is then allowed to flow downstream to the next farm. In winter, when the melting glaciers are pretty much frozen and reduced to a trickle, they access water from underground streams for drinking water. All these channels are maintained and managed by local villagers and work without pumps, using gravity to manage flows to every field in the village.

Water management systems in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh which we saw recently were created by the erstwhile Rajas of the area and are based on a network of channels and streams that have been created from offshoots of melting glaciers and rivers. These channels still irrigate lands 100 kms downstream from the glaciers and river sources.

Returning to Nitya Jacob's book, here are some of the salient points from his book, an interesting read:

• Of all the countries in the world, India gets the highest rainfall per square unit of land area. If we walled the country and didn't let any water escape into the sea, we would have about 1 metre of water over our land-mass, enough to meet our needs and more!
• Most of the rain falls over 100 hours and needs to be used over 8000+ hours in the year.
• Many extremely well planned water management systems existed in India over millenia and were used to create everything from an abundance of food, the cooling systems of the Rajasthani palaces, the fountain systems of the Mughal gardens and the Taj Mahal.
• All the water management systems were mapped to the local conditions of geography and social practices and were based on decentralization, responsibility, accountability and judicial wisdom.
• Some areas of the dry ravines of the Chambal (M.P.) and Rajasthan have created wonders with their ability to stretch the availability of water through till summer.
• A wonderful, gravity controlled, bamboo channels based drip irrigation system in the Garo Hills in Meghalaya, where drops of water supply to each tree is controlled through the use of varying sizes of bamboo helps stretch the water of the monsoons through till the next one.
• All "water keepers" in the villages are local people from the community that everybody "listens to".
• In the Chambal, reformed dacoits are now changing villages with their passion for greening their villages through water management.
• Large dams, projects, centralized planning and irrigation departments are created by politicians and businesses to make money. Small, but socially accountable systems are of no interest due to obvious reasons.
• Indians (and the world) have moved from local communities getting together and taking care of their surroundings to depending on the government to do everything for them, including providing for and taking care of water! Not very decentralized or efficient and has taken "accountability" away from citizens.
• Good news - Many parts of India have started reviving these water management systems with the involvement of local people, farmers, NGOs and government agencies.
• One big negative point of the book - no diagrams, sketches, photos, maps to show how all these systems work. Like most Indians, lengthy prose without taking the trouble to make it easy for readers to quickly understand and use - no pictures!!

Time for decentralized water management
There has been considerable debate on the the mismanagement of the world's water resources. We have moved from surplus to scarcity (which is not only because of population increase) and the world and India in particular has moved to "outsourcing" of a community's responsibility to governments. Reflect over our (low) levels of participation in the needs of a housing society or a gated community and its maintenance and we'll all know that the apathy is just not in the villages.