Oct 2005

Rainwater harvesting can’t be just paid lip service. We ignore these practices at our own peril in cities...

Currently the water supply situation in almost every Indian city, including Delhi and Mumbai, is alarming. People waiting in serpentine queues for a trickle from the public tap is a common sight.
Rainwater harvesting has, therefore, emerged as a viable solution for the long-term. Though rainwater has been harvested traditionally, we stopped employing these native techniques as we urbanized. Now, as taps dry up, we need to turn to these methods once again.

We are into the seventh consecutive year of drought declared in the Indira Gandhi canal command area in the districts of Bikaner and Jaisalmer of western Rajasthan. In these areas ‘drought’ never really went off the ground since last year though ‘famine relief’ has been on with different agencies like the PHED, CADA, DRDA, BADEP and other favourite institutions of local governance acting as nodal agencies for execution of these relief works.

It is no aquatic crop: it has great ability to tolerate submergence. Water creates unfavourable conditions for weeds, by cutting off sunlight and aeration to the ground. So rice farmers adopted the practice of submerging rice in water to check growth of weeds. Over the years, it has almost become a prerequisite for rice cultivation.

In the tiny village of Dasayanadoddy in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district, thirty-five families farming meagre plots of groundnut and ragi barely keep their hearth fires burning. However, a lone farmer’s experimentation on his one -acre land has changed his fortunes.

This time among the tight complement of features that Xover offers is one by C K Meena [Shopper Morphs into a Garbage Truck with Legs] taking a good serious dig at this disease of consumerism that is eating into the vitals of our system. It’s insidious, like a cancerous growth. There was another evening when a friend sat and quietly ran down the excesses of the liberalization that India unleashed in 1991. It was hard to persuade him to see that the trouble was not with liberalisation per se, but with the next step of globalisation that we have willingly exposed ourselves to.