Water Wisdom

They are called kuhals in Jammu, kuls in Himachal Pradesh and guls in Uttarakhand. Maharashtians call them pats. In Ladakh they are called zings, and in Nagaland, zabo. Tamilians call them eris; Kannadigas, keres. Rajasthanis have tankas, kundis, bawdis and jhalaras among other names.
These are traditional water harvesting systems. Ride any highway or the great Indian rail, and you see green vistas and the occasional tank or large water body. Count on it that it did not exist some years ago. Some of them are no more than a few decades old. Some are centuries old. From the time of the Moghuls in the North, Krishnadevaraya in the South, even the Cholas in the deep South, there have been tanks, anecuts and check dams built.
They were not engineers in the way you and I know what these professionals represent as sets of skills.
They brought a certain understanding of the sensitivities of land and flora and fauna that seems to have disappeared altogether. They worked under the munificence of the kinds. Better still, they worked as a community and brought some uncanny insight that was far-sighted.
If you are sceptical of what you read, all you have to do is take a long excursion into Rajasthan‘s hinterland, or even the bowels of arid districts like Belgaum.
It is only in post-independent India that people slowly built their dependence on the drug called subsidy or grant. And good, thinking communities completely paralysed their native processes of harnessing water from systems that were riverfed or streamfed.
For centuries people have been building dams. But these have been built over seasonal channels to capture the runoff. Unlike the abominably huge structures that we have known as dams, these traditional dams aimed at moistening the soil so that the post-monsoon crop would be assured of the rich soil of the tank bed itself.
There is a catch to this. It has to be necessarily participatory. It has to be dynamic, responding each season to the few mends and repairs that such structures will need.
The government, by the very way it works, cannot be capable of this. It is the village and its people who can, and know how to, do this.
They need continuous monitoring, maintaining and repairing. And then there are complexities of who gets what as share of the water. Across the country, from the Kacharis in north Bihar, to the farmers in Nagercoil, they have devised a variety of property rights systems to share water and to maintain harvesting networks.
In distant Jaisalmer and Barmer districts of Rajasthan, they receive less than 4 inches of rainfall. Many regions of the country that get 35 inches of rainfall are reeling with water shortages, while in desert-laden Rajasthan, the state gazetteer documents that 95 per cent of the villages have drinking water! As someone wrily remarked, “The statistics may be the government‘t handiwork, but the work is not. That has been done by the people.”
So what is so unique about these systems? The important thing is that the effort is aimed at stopping rainwater where it falls. The design and structure of the system determine how this is done. If the water falls in the courtyard, it can be harvested in an underground tank, with the rooftank attached to it through pipes. The capacity varies according to size of household. Every part of the tank is specifically defined and constructed. The architecture is scienti-fic. In most parts of Rajasthan the knowledge is poorly documented. Yet even youngsters are aware of the how-to‘s.
It‘s amazing how with as little rainwater as these regions get, people of the state do not migrate or agitate.
And therein lies the key. From Gulbarga to Aurangabad; from Deodurg to Anantapur, over a hundred of the 200-plus districts of the country need to get wiser.
And then, of course, the urban Indian who is the most literate, yet the most uneducated when it comes to understand the far strategic needs of the future.
It‘s about time we prized this precious resource—and not shrug our shoulders and dismiss these concerns as those of the government. There lies somewhere a road to disaster.