from the International Monetary Fund
— this post authored by Ashlin Mathew
Rajendra Singh set out to cure the sick. He ended up taking on a far bigger problem: the shortage of water in India, a drought-plagued country with 17 percent of the world’s population but just 4 percent of its freshwater resources. It’s a crusade that has earned him the moniker “Waterman of India.”
In 1983, Singh quit an unrewarding civil service job to take advantage of his training in Ayurveda, an Indian system of medicine based on herbal remedies. He moved from Jaipur, the capital of the northern state of Rajasthan, to Gopalpura, a small village where a number of people suffered from night blindness, a condition in developing countries caused by vitamin A deficiency.
“I wanted to set up an Ayurvedic clinic to help cure them,” Singh says. “While I did do that as well, the people in the village underscored the fact that their immediate crisis was one of water.”
One of Singh’s patients told him about johads, traditional reservoirs made of rocks and earth. Singh, the son of a farmer, quickly understood the need for the reservoirs, which capture rainwater and so help prevent a decline in the water table. He enlisted the help of several friends and a few villagers to build the first johad, in 1985.
“There weren’t many people as most had migrated to the city as a result of water scarcity in the village,” Singh, 63, explains. “Most often it was the women in the village who helped.”
He persuaded villagers to overcome caste divisions and work together. “That was the only way water would become a collective and community project,” he says. It took more than eight months to build the johad, which is 15 feet deep and covers one acre.
Then they waited for the rains. By the end of the season, the reservoir was full. Soon water began to appear in wells that had been dry for years. Word spread, and people who had left the village began to return. “After the first johad helped the community, we have never been out of work.”
Singh built the first few johads with money he had made selling his belongings when he left Jaipur. He got help from a development organization, Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action, which donated truckloads of grain that he used to pay workers.
In the decades since, Singh and his organization, Tarun Bharat Sangh, have built more than 11,800 johads, helping make 1,200 villages water sufficient. Starting with a few students and professors from the University of Rajasthan, the group now has 62 full-time employees, 3,000 part-time employees, and more than 10,000 volunteers. His son, Maulik, is the group’s director.
Recharging underground water aquifers also helps mitigate climate change by restoring the growth of trees in drought-stricken regions. Singh’s current project is to adapt to climate change through water management. This project is being undertaken in 30 villages in a district of Rajasthan where the majority of people belong to the most marginalized and poorest communities.
Singh has a long record of activism. In the 1990s, he organized a demonstration calling for the protection of rivers and mountains, leading marchers on an 800-kilometer trek from Jaipur to Gangotri, a town in the Himalayas at the source of the Ganges River. Soon after, he led a successful campaign against mining in the Aravalli Range, whose hills recharge aquifers in northwestern India and help arrest the advancing desert.
Singh says community-based efforts are more effective ways to conserve water than large infrastructure projects to pipe water to homes. “Where will the water in these pipes come from?” he asks.
“Community-based water-harvesting projects are the only way India can recharge its groundwater levels to mitigate drought,” he says. “People should take ownership of their water bodies. Otherwise, no conservation effort will last long.”
PHOTOS:
COURTESY OF RAJENDRA SINGH
Source
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