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the year 1979 had seen a debilitating drought sweep across India. As rains failed, agricultural production dropped, resulting in enormous human misery. Nestled in the denuded sub-Himalayan Shivalik hills, the poor villagers of Sukhomajri in Haryana were not spared either. They had managed to grow just one monsoon crop a year in normal circumstances; this year, they were not going to get even that.
However, even in this desolate landscape, there was a ray of hope. P R Mishra, a soil conservationist who was trying to get the villagers to stop grazing their animals in the region's degraded watershed, had earlier in the year worked with them to build a small earthen dam across the seasonal stream that ran through Sukhomajri. Desperate for the water stored behind the dam, the villagers appealed to the soil conservationist to help them make channels for conveying the water to their fields. But before giving his assent, Mishra told the villagers that if they did not stop grazing their cattle in the watershed now, their own dam would get silted up very fast and they would not have this water when the next drought hit the village. The villagers agreed to take care of the watershed. Thus, good water management through small water harvesting tanks gave birth to a pioneering village-based natural resource management system which has since inspired many Indian environmentalists and village workers. Today, the village has several such water harvesting structures and can grow three crops a year regularly. From an essentially food-importing village, it has become a food-exporting one. And with grass productivity increasing and trees regenerating, the region now has so much fodder that the villagers have given up their goats in favour of high-yielding buffaloes; they sell several lakhs of rupees worth of milk to neighbouring towns. Says economist Gopal Kadekodi at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, "The rate of return from this project cannot be matched even by the corporate sector."
Around the same time, in the mid-'70s, a jeep driver in the Indian army had returned to his parched village, Ralegan Siddhi, in the drought-prone district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. Faced with intensive land degradation, denudation and dried-up water sources, the village had fallen victim to massive male migration, rampant illicit liquor brewing and heavy alcoholism. Krishna Bhaurao Hazare, the jeep driver, took a decision which was to change the face of his village. He began organising the people for constructing small dams across the various seasonal channels that went through and around the village, so that every drop of rain could be harvested and allowed to percolate into the soil to enrich the groundwater reserves. With the help of the increasing groundwater, the villagers slowly began improving their agriculture by using water-conserving crops. In the last two decades, the dramatic change in the economy of Ralegan Siddhi has made it a model village, attracting nationwide attention. Krishna Bhaurao, who has also become a leading crusader against government corruption at the grassroot level, is popularly known today as Anna ('big brother') Hazare.
Tarun Bharat Sangh (tbs), an ngo working in the drought-prone district of Alwar, which straddles the Aravalli hill chain, has a similar story to relate. Rajendra Singh of the Sangh began encouraging the region's villagers to take their destiny in their own hands and revive their traditional water harvesting systems called johads, which consist of earthen dams thrown across seasonal channels. But unlike a normal dam, the rainwater here is collected during monsoon and allowed to percolate into the soil. Beginning in the early '80s, the tbs has by now constructed nearly 1,200 johads ensuring assured crop output in about as many villages in the region.
During the drought of 1987 -- probably the worst of the century -- journalist Om Thanvi had scoured the Rajasthan desert to assess the state of the region's water harvesting systems. An acute shortage of drinking water marked the region, with government agencies desperately trying to reach water to far-flung rural communities on trucks. Thanvi was amazed to find that wherever households had not given up their traditional rainwater harvesting systems called kundis, the urgency for the government water tankers was much less or non-existent. Following the drought, the government actually began to encourage the construction of such structures and the villagers also learnt an important lesson: Keep your own kundis intact while welcoming the extra water the government supplied.
In the hill-top town of Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram -- a region known for its heavy downpours -- local residents found that increasing urbanisation had led to denudation and destruction of mountain springs, thus creating an enormous water scarcity. The town, facing an unmanageable expenditure running a fleet of trucks up and down the steep hills ferrying water from the river in the valley below, decided to encourage rooftop water collection. Today, almost every house in Aizawl has developed its own independent water supply system.
The premise is clear: India, after having gone through an extended 50-year phase of constructing big dams and canals, is once again being forced to look at its traditional, smallscale water harvesting and management systems -- especially amongst grassroots organisations which are working with the people to develop cheap water management systems that the people can themselves manage.
Our traditional water harvesting structures demonstrate the people's ingenuity at its best. Using unique modes and basic engineering skills, Indians have developed a wide array of techniques for satisfying their thirstIndia has an extraordinary diversity of agro-ecological systems, ranging from the hot desert of Rajasthan to the cold desert of trans-Himalayan Ladakh, from the sub-temperate Himalayan mountains to the high tropical mountains in the south; interspersed are various hill and mountain ranges, plateaus and the unique Indo-Gangetic plains which are more flood-prone than any other part in the world.
Hill areas: convenient modes
Traditionally, wherever there were streams, especially in the hill and mountain regions of India, people diverted the water with the help of simple engineering structures, into artificial channels that would take the water to agricultural fields. In arid and semi-arid regions, where streams were more seasonal, the diversion channels were first directed into a storage structure -- variously called a zing in Ladakh, an ahar in south Bihar or a kere in Karnataka -- so that the water could be used in the dry period for human and animal consumption and for agriculture. Stream flow in the desert of Ladakh, as it is dependent on glacier melt, is almost non-existent in the morning but heavy in the evening -- a time when cultivators cannot use it. Therefore, Ladakhis traditionally divert the evening flows into a small reservoir to use it next morning. In certain villages of the eastern Himalayan states of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, the villagers take the diverted channel through a cattleshed so that the water can pick up rich nutrients before it reaches their fields. The Angami Naga tribals ensure that forests above the main stream are never cut so that the streamwater remains full of nutrient-rich forest humus.
In fact, in terms of carrying water over a difficult terrain, the indigenous people of north-eastern India, traditionally expert in the use of bamboo, have developed some of the most interesting and artistic systems. All over eastern Himalaya and the north-eastern hill ranges, people continue to build bamboo pipelines to carry water from natural springs to a convenient point, where it can be used for drinking. But this art has been raised to a sublime level by the people of southern Meghalaya, living near the border of Bangladesh, who have used intricate networks of bamboo pipelines to deliver water to betel leaf plantations in rocky areas; it is impossible to build channels in such areas. The entire system literally works like a modern drip irrigation network which delivers measured quantities of water straight to the roots of the plants. Some 18-20 l of water enter the bamboo irrigation systems every minute and after getting transported over several hundred metres, finally get reduced to 20-80 drops per minute at the site of the plant.
Tamil Nadu: tank culture
Not all storage structures are riverfed or streamfed. Many of them simply collect water running off a catchment area to be stored for later use. But in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a big stream is often diverted to feed a chain of 25-30 tanks in sequence. As this chain of tanks -- called 'system tanks' -- is served by a stream collecting water over a large catchment, it is traditionally considered much more desirable than a tank with a single, small catchment. Because of the wide variability in rainfall in both space and time, agricultural lands served by system tanks have always been more expensive and prized than lands served by stand-alone tanks. The Palar anicut (dam) system, for example, supplies water to 317 tanks, irrigating about 32,000 ha in North Arcot and Chengalpattu districts. Some tanks are supplied directly by channels coming from the Palar river, but several others depend mainly on the surplus flows of upstream tanks. The profusion of tanks in Ramnathapuram district of the state can even be seen from a satellite.
In western and central India
In several parts of India, people have been building dams across seasonal channels to capture the runoff. But these structures, unlike normal dams, are used to moisten the soil so that the post-monsoon crop would be assured of the rich soil of the tank bed itself. In the haveli system of Madhya Pradesh, the nature of the soils and traditional crops have forced farmers to store rainwater in the agricultural fields itself. The fields would be embanked and farmers would work out an arrangement amongst themselves to allow rainwater to flow from one field to the other. The collected water would seep into the soil and give it enough moisture for growing a good crop in the following dry period.
The nomadic Maldharis of Gujarat's inhospitable Kutch region have developed an interesting system of procuring potable sweetwater, even in an area where rainwater is scarce and groundwater is saline. They know that density of sweetwater is less than that of saline water and, hence, it is theo retically possible to keep the harvested sweet rainwater stored in a way that it will continue to float over the denser saline water. With this knowledge, they have developed precisely such a system, locally called virda, which is essentially like a well in a tank.
In dry areas of Rajasthan, people have traditionally practised conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater (see box: Jodhpur: providing an example). They invariably built structures like wells and stepwells -- wells with a flight of stairs leading down to the water -- below tanks and other types of water storage structures. Thus, when the tank water dried up, people could at least harvest clean groundwater to meet their drinking water needs. In other places, people would make wells in the tank bed from which they would collect groundwater for drinking. In many places, the surface runoff collected in the tank would not be used for drinking if clean groundwater was available from wells and stepwells. Rajasthan also has an old tradition of using rooftops as a catchment area to collect rainwater. In the town of Phalodi, if one household does not want to collect water from its rooftop, the neighbours borrow the roof to collect water for their purposes.
In areas where land is not a limiting factor, people have even developed customised rainwater harvesting structures called kundis. These amazing structures -- apparently unique to the region -- dot the landscape of Churu district in the Thar desert. Kundis are artificial wells which store runoff from an artificially prepared catchment surrounding them so that rainwater that falls on the catchment rapidly runs into the well and gets stored. They can be made anywhere if adequate land is available. Their potential can be understood by the following fact: If an area receives only 100 mm of rainfall -- which would make it an extremely arid environment -- this rain harvested over one ha of land would provide one million litre (l) of water a year. As a family of five would not need more than 10-15 l a day for drinking and cooking -- or 3,650-5,475 l a year -- 180-270 families could meet their most critical water needs by building a one-ha kundi. Management: of the people, by the people
Elaborate community-based water management systems, including ingenious property rights systems, have been in vogue in the country for ages
Water harvesting systems are fragile creations. They have to be continuously monitored, maintained and repaired. Even more difficult is sharing the scarce water amongst its consumers, particularly farmers. Popular ingenuity has found a way out even here: Across the country, people have devised a variety of property rights systems to share water and to maintain their water harvesting networks.
Himalaya and the north-east: right methods
To ensure equity in distribution of the scarce water, villagers in Ladakh elect a water official every year, known as churpun. This is done at the start of each agricultural season. The churpun ensures that each farmer gets adequate water in proportion to the area of land he owns without leaving any field unirrigated. Hence, disputes over the use of water are very rare. Canals are repaired by community effort. The position of churpun rotates amongst all households to ensure that no household monopolises this critical post.
Villagers in Nagaland have also developed a variety of practices in order to share the available water for their terraced rice plots. While water sources are common property, land is a private acquisition. There are cases where water is transported over channels several kilometres long to reach crop-fields. In some Naga villages, local chiefs stand on a rock on a particular day in the months of May, June and July, and exhort villagers to offer prayers for good water and to clean the traditional water sources. Among the Angamis, Chakhesangs and Zeliang tribes, traditional water rights are held very rigidly by individuals, clans or khels (villages). In Khonoma village of Kohima district, for instance, the person whose field is closest to the water source is responsible for conserving the source. But the individual whose field is at the bottom of the canal is its owner; he,she has a major share of water and also regulates the flow of the water. He,she is also responsible for keeping the canal clean. While every one has the right to take water from the stream, nobody can take more than the demarcated share.
In Kikruma, a Chakhesang village located in Phek district, a curious combination of water rights is in vogue. If a spring exists on a particular terrace which is not yet cultivated, the person below it is entitled to use it to develop his terrace. But in case the owner of the uncultivated terrace decides to develop his terrace at some later date, then the two will share the water equally. In general, the rights over runoff between different terraces is respected. The person at the top end of the terrace cannot harness what is legitimately the runoff right of those below. The maintenance of all channels and catchment areas of ponds is done once every year, usually before the onset of the monsoon. The responsibility of mobilising people to clean the channels rests with the last person tapping the channel, locally referred to as the neipu, which literally means the lord.
Inhabitants of the central Himalayan villages of Uttar Pradesh have adopted a simple device to avoid excess water being drawn by a channel at the head, thereby leaving less water for downstream users. A small boulder is placed at the mouth of each turnout. The size of the stone at successive water turnouts gets progressively smaller. Some measure of equity is thus ensured in water distribution. Water distribution in Ladyura village, for instance, is carried out by an irrigation committee which has 10 members, including a chowkidar (guard). Many non-elected members who are familiar with water distribution arrangements are co-opted as members. Major decisions are taken in a general body meeting which is open to all residents of the village. There is a mechanism to resolve disputes, under which the irrigation committee members of the upstream and downstream villages sharing the same channel meet to discuss the matter.
Maharashtra's phad system
The community-managed phad irrigation system, prevalent in Dhule and Nasik districts of north-western Maharashtra, probably came into existence some 300-400 years ago. A series of bandharas (dams) were built on the local rivers to divert water. In the phad system, variations in water availability from one year to another were managed by demarcating the command area into two categories: one with assured and another with unassured irrigation. In the years of good rain, the unassured area, which is invariably at the tail-end, also gets irrigation benefits.
Only one crop can be grown in one phad; the variety of crops to be grown in different phads is decided by an assembly of irrigators, depending on water availability. Crops are rotated among the phads so that over a period of two to three years every phad gets to grow sugarcane, the main cash crop. In Daterti village, for instance, the total cultivated land is divided into four phads (see figure). Every landowner has a plot of land in each of the four phads. In a year of plentiful water the community may decide to grow sugarcane in three and millet in one. Conversely, in a year which has seen an average rainfall, the farmers may grow two phads of sugarcane and two of millet. In a bad year, the community may allow sugarcane in only one, grow millet in two and even keep one fallow.
Pre-colonial roots
When the British disembarked on the Indian shores, they saw a land extremely rich, highly urbanised and intensely literate, with a flourishing tradition of arts, crafts and literature. The wealth of the land came from its internal resource mobilisation. The surplus generated in the villages not only supported the villages themselves, but also the cities and towns of the country. Over the centuries, Indians had learnt to use their land-water-vegetation resources in an intelligent and sustainable manner. The resource base around each village had been transformed into a complex agro-ecosystem of croplands, grazing lands (grasslands), and forest and tree lands, thus constituting an interactive multi-componential biological system that responded not only to the region's sharp seasonal rhythms, but also reduced risk by keeping the social and economic impact of rainfall variations down to a minimum. Due to the seasonal nature of rains, the people learnt to store the rainwater or the streamwater that flowed past during the monsoon season, in their own villages. When the British came, there were already thousands of water storage tanks in use across the country.
The Indian rulers preceding the British did not boast of irrigation bureaucracies or public works departments to create these structures. Referring to Rajasthan's Thar desert, traditional knowledge expert Komal Kothari says, "While collecting information from some 600 villages, I found that the state, the jagirdar (landowner) or anybody who had anything to do with revenue collection did not create any water body for the people. All water bodies constructed by the erstwhile kings, jagirdars, chiefs and chieftains were reserved for their personal use. The people largely had to fend for themselves." Though the role of the state varied from one region to another, it was nonetheless true that the rulers rarely built irrigation structures themselves. The massive Pichola lake in the city of Udaipur, for instance, was built by nomadic gypsies. However, the rulers did play an important role in encouraging people to build water harvesting structures.
The Vijayanagar empire
The famous Vijayanagar kings of south India (1336-1564 ad), for instance, placed great importance on developing irrigation facilities for agricultural improvement. Emperor Krishnadeva Raya (1509-1530), the greatest of the Vijayanagar rulers, once pointed out that the extent of a state is the root cause of its prosperity. Conversely, if the state was small, its prosperity will increase only when tanks and irrigation canals were constructed and favour was shown to poor cultivators in matters of taxation and services. The Vijayanagar kings, therefore, constructed irrigation tanks and canals themselves, though more rarely. But, more importantly, they encouraged private initiative in irrigation development in different ways.
In those days, land tax, which was collected in kind in the form of one-sixth of the produce, was an important source of revenue for Indian rulers. Thus, the rulers' fortunes depended on agriculture. The state, therefore, had a vested interest in encouraging private initiative to develop irrigation systems. The Vijayanagar kings would make dasavanda or kattu kodage grants to individuals or institutions which undertook such works. The enterprising person would be granted a piece of tax-free land watered by the tank, canal or well which he/she excavated. The extent of the grant varied with the importance of the work. Thus, when one Harinideva Vodeyar constructed a tank in Mysore district, he was given a grant by emperor Deva Raya ii (1423-1446); Vodeyar received a second grant when he enlarged the tank.
Dasavanda grants were made not just by the kings. A record of 1497 in the present Chittoor district registers a kattu kodage grant of land at Gundalahalli, made by the sthanika (manager) of a temple to one Narasimhadeva for digging a tank in the village belonging to the Kadiri Lakshminarsimha temple and for bringing the surrounding lands under cultivation.
Great religious merit was also attached to the maintenance and repair of irrigation works by the Vijayanagar kings. An inscription dating to 1413 states: "A ruined family, a breached tank or pond, a fallen kingdom, whomsoever restores, or repairs a damaged temple, acquires merit four-fold of that which accrued from them at first."
Early British observers were full of praise for the Vijayanagar irrigation works they saw. C S Crole, author of The Manual of Chengleput District (1879), said: "Almost every catchment basin, however small, still bears traces of having been bunded across and in many instances this was done in order to secure a crop of paddy on a few acres of stony ungenerous soil, to which all the fostering care of the British administration has failed to induce cultivation to return. Large and more expensive projects were not neglected. Even some of them bear witness to the enlightenment of those Hindu kings, while the absence of scientific instruments in those remote times compels the astonishment of the beholder."
Colonel Thomas Munro (the governor of Madras in 1820), noting the irrigation system in the area around Vijayanagar, said: "To attempt the construction of new tanks is perhaps a more hopeless experiment than the repair of those which have been filled up (through siltation), for there is scarcely any place where a tank can be made to advantage that has not been applied to this purpose by the inhabitants."
The Gond kingdom
The tribal Gond ings, who were great empire builders-- by the 9th century ad, the whole of the eastern section of Central Provinces had come under Gond influence and was known as Gondwana (forest of the Gonds), from which is derived the name of Gondwanaland, the ancient geological continent -- followed a similar practice of encouraging water harvesting methods. Ruins of old irrigation works dot the pre-colonial states of Patna and Sambalpur ( both now in Orissa). In the Gond empire, building of reservoirs for irrigation was the foremost duty of a village chief. Though the Gonds had a strong central government, each village was independent in its economy and governance. The village was primarily a settlement of peasants, and its assembly an association of cultivators. Its prosperity rested on proper management of land and water resources. Repairs of channels, embankments and distributaries were immediately taken up after the first rainfall. To anyone who constructed a tank, the Gond kings gave a grant of revenue-free land lying below it. Rent-free land was given to the kodas, a class of people who were experts in excavating water reservoirs and who looked after the maintenance of irrigation works; such land grants were known as sagar rakshya jagit. Agricultural prosperity increased under the Gond rulers, and great works like the Rani Talab near Jubalpur remain to this day as monuments to their rule.
British rule: seeds of disruption
British rule, unfortunately, laid this enormous heritage to waste. In their desire to rule, administer and maximise their revenues from this rich land, the British steadily impoverished the rural communities, leading to the destruction of their resource management systems, including the water management structures that had emerged over the centuries.
How the seeds were sown
Early British observers like Charles Metcalfe and Henry Maine had described India as a largely happy land of 'village republics'. What this meant, says historian Dharampal, is "that the 'village', to an extent, had all the semblance of the State; it controlled revenue and exercised authority within its sphere... The basic element of this 'village republic' was the authority it wielded, the resources it controlled, and dispensed, and the manner of such resource utilisation... Indian society and polity had basically been organised according to non-centralist concepts... That the annual exchequer receipts of Mughal emperor Jahangir did not amount to more than five per cent of the computed revenue of his empire, and that of (later Emperor) Aurangzeb with all his zeal for maximising such receipts, did not ever exceed 20 per cent, is symptomatic of the concepts and arrangements which governed Indian polity... there is voluminous data scattered in the British records themselves which confirm the view, that in terms of the basic expenses, both education and medical care, the expenses of the local police, and the maintenance of irrigation facilities, had primary claims on revenue..."
Dharampal points out that data collected by the British in the 1770s and 1780s from Bengal and Bihar showed that revenues of these areas were divided into several categories. The 'khalsa' were those sources whose revenue was received in the exchequer of the ruling authority. Two of the other categories which probably accounted for about 80 per cent of the computed revenue of an area were termed as 'chakeran zemin' and 'bazee zemin'. The former implied such recipients of revenue who were engaged in administrative, economic and accounting activities and were remunerated by assignments of revenue. The latter meant those individuals, groups and institutions which, according to the British, were in receipt of what were termed "religious and charitable allowances".
Assignments under bazee zemin were quite high. In Bengal, the British noted that "almost one half of the province is held upon free tenure" under the bazee zemin category. In many districts of Bengal and Bihar there were as many as 30,000 to 36,000 recipients per district. Even after 1750-1800, the period during which the British took control of south India, the situation in Madras presidency was not much different. As late as 1801, over 35 per cent of the total cultivated land in the present Rayalseema area and the district of Bellary came under the category of revenue-free assignments. Says Dharampal, "What was true of Bengal, Bihar and the Madras presidencies applied equally to other areas in India, whether in the areas of the Bombay presidency, or of Punjab, or in the Rajasthan states."
By about 1800, a very large percentage of these revenue assignments had been altogether dispossessed, reducing their beneficiaries to penury. Most of the remaining had their assignments greatly reduced so that they could no longer perform the educational, water management or other functions that they were expected to undertake. It was the task of Thomas Munro to reduce revenue-free assignments in the ceded districts to a mere five per cent of the total cultivated land. The revenue thus collected was drained out of the land and the country, leaving behind a devastated natural resource management system. With the destruction of the indigenous financial system, community property slowly became nobody's property.
Furthermore, what the colonial rulers could not own or earn money from, they neglected. As Arthur Cotton, the pioneer of modern irrigation in India, himself noted in 1874 about local water harvesting systems: "There are a multitude of old native works in various parts of India... These are noble works, and show both boldness and engineering talent. They have stood for hundreds of years. When I first arrived in India, the contempt with which the natives justly spoke of us on account of this neglect of material improvements was very striking; they used to say we were a kind of civilised savages, wonderfully expert about fighting but so inferior to their great men that we would not even keep in repair the works they had constructed, much less even imitate them in extending the system."
The cancer spreads
The British tried to take remedial measures when they realised their mistake, but they failed to comprehend the strength of the indigenous system completely. As a result, the measures they undertook also failed. Firstly, they created irrigation and public works bureaucracies which were supposed to own and manage the neglected water harvesting systems. When these technocracies failed to revive these systems, the British authorities in Madras presidency, in the mistaken belief that local communities would undertake voluntary labour to maintain the tanks as a tradition, enacted the notorious Madras Compulsory Labour Act of 1858. In Bengal, as William Willcocks pointed out (see box: The legacy of Bill Willcocks), the British even failed to understand the technological nature of the indigenous irrigation system.
With the progress of British rule, there was also a gradual shift in emphasis from minor irrigation works like tanks, wells, bandharas (dams) and small river channels to large dams and canals commanding extensive areas. Indian rulers, on the other hand, continued to build and maintain tanks in states which had remained free from British rule. In contrast to the erstwhile Madras presidency area, there is evidence that tank irrigation in the former Hyderabad state was of more recent origin. Under the Nizams, from 4,500 ha in 1895-96, the public works department (pwd) of the Hyderabad state reached around 45,000 ha of tank-irrigated area around the turn of the century, and between 324,000 ha and 364,500 ha some 40 years later. The fact that the pwd of Hyderabad expanded the tank-irrigated area while the British government in Madras presidency did not do so, indicates that the intensity of tank irrigation in different areas was greatly influenced by the policies of their respective governments.
Even worse, the British, in their bid to rule, educated an entire class of Indians which no longer appreciated or understood India. They were, in fact, so successful that when India became independent, the leaders of modern India also turned their backs on these systems. Indians invested almost exclusively in mega-irrigation projects, greatly influenced by the technological dreams of socialist countries like the Soviet Union.
A persistent downslide
Over time, other changes have taken place in several parts of India which have further eroded the traditional water harvesting systems. Overall, there has been a downfall in community self-management as bureaucratic intervention in village affairs has been steadily encouraged by India's political leaders. Technological changes like the introduction of tubewells means that richer farmers in the command area of a tank, who can install these tubewells, no longer have an interest in cooperating with the rest of the community in managing the tanks. The future of the phad system in Maharashtra, for instance, is now uncertain. Firstly, the government has, in its usual unimaginative manner, built reservoirs upstream to utilise the available river waters, thus affecting the post-monsoon flows downstream, where the bandharas feeding the phads with water were built. Secondly, a sugar factory has come up in the area, increasing the demand for sugarcane, a water-intensive crop.
Many central and southern Indian cities like Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras) and Bangalore grew up around traditional water harvesting systems. But in these urban areas too, these systems have either disappeared because of pressure from real estate lobbies or have become heavily polluted. As a result, traditional water harvesting systems continue to play an important role largely in remote areas where the reach of water bureaucracies remains weak, as in many Himalayan states.
Promising potential
A revival of these systems, however, is in the offing. Their potential is once again being recognised and debated over. This is because the large water supply systems built around mega-dams have proved to be extremely capital-intensive, with long gestation periods, and rather low returns in terms of increased crop productivity, largely because the water supplied by these systems is determined more by bureaucracies controlling these systems rather than the farmers. Irrigation efficiency of tubewells, since they are farmer-controlled, has been much better. But the rapid increase in tubewells in dry areas, without the supplemental groundwater recharge that used to be ensured by traditional water harvesting systems, is leading to a depletion of groundwater aquifers and will become a severe problem in the years to come. Rainwater harvesting systems, on the other hand, require small sums of money, a large part of which can come from local communities, thus avoiding an undue drain on the state exchequer; they can be built within months (instead of years like large dams); they will be under the control of farmers themselves; and, they can be used conjunctively with tubewells as they can recharge the groundwater aquifers.
In terms of the water they can store, their potential is stupendous. If five per cent of India's land area -- about 15 mha -- was used to store water at an average depth of five metre, India would be able to get 37.5-75 mha-metre of water annually, depending on the rainwater collection efficiency ranging from 50 per cent to 100 per cent.
There is, theoretically speaking, no village in India which cannot meet its drinking and cooking water needs through rainwater harvesting. If an average individual needs 2.5 l per day of water for cooking and drinking, a billion people India's expected population by the turn of the century, will need about 2.5 billion l per day or 912.5 billion l per year. If rain was harvested over a mere 83,000 ha or 830 sq km every year (the Union territory of Delhi alone is 1,483 sq km), clean drinking and cooking water could be obtained for the country's entire population. And if the nationwide supply of water was stipulated at 100 l per person per day, the norm used in many urban areas, then too all that we would need is one per cent of India's land area to set aside for rainwater harvesting. If the rainwater collection efficiency was only 50 per cent, the total land requirement would not be more than two per cent of India's land area. Given the already horrendous and still growing pollution of India's rivers with industrial contaminants and fertiliser and pesticide runoffs from farmlands, Indians may soon have no other option but to capture raindrops as a clean water source. The technological options to clean the raw river water from contaminants will probably be impossible for India to afford.
Thus, with about five-10 per cent of India's land area set aside for rainwater collection, most of India's irrigation and household water needs can be met. But a decentralised system of water management will demand a community-based system of natural resource management. Unfortunately, most laws that govern India's land, water and forests even today are the same as those formulated by the British. The Indian government has the unique honour of trying to deal with 21st century problems of environmental management with archaic 19th century laws and bureaucracies of a colonial ruler. The key question today is will Indian governments continue to manage the environment through their gilded bureaucracies, or will they democratise its control and leave its management to rural communities?
Down To Earth will carry more on traditional water harvesting systems in its forthcoming issues. Readers are invited to send in their comments and contributions. Those interested in purchasing a copy of the Fourth Citizens' Report may write to S Banerji, Sales Manager, Centre for Science and Environment, 41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi - 110 062