Autores: Amanda Suutari, Gerry Marten, Steve Brooks
- Asistencia en visitas al sitio y aportaciones editoriales: Ann Marten
- Esta historia detallada de un Punto de Inflexión Ecológica incluye una fotogalería
Los pozos del distrito de Alwar, en Rajastán se habían secado, arrastrando a su gente a una pobreza extrema y aparentemente sin remedio. La recuperación de presas tradicionales de captación pluvial para recargar el manto acuífero fue el punto de inflexión que resucitó los pozos. Y con el agua regresó una mejor vida para los habitantes. El proceso comenzó en un la humilde aldea de Gopalpura, y actualmente cerca de mil aldeas han seguido su ejemplo.
On the surface, the Indian village of Gopalpura looks little different from the way it did the day a young Rajendra Singh arrived, back in 1985. Only 120 miles but a world away from the clamor and chaos of New Delhi, it’s still a dusty hamlet, where older dwellings are built of mud bricks and newer ones of cinderblocks. Women in worn but colorful saris walk the dirt paths, balancing clay pots on their heads as they approach the village water pump.
But an Indian Rip Van Winkle, as he awakened after twenty years, would notice some important changes. Scattered around the village and its borders are patches of green, of trees and fields, a break from the monotonous scrub that dominates the northeast corner of Rajasthan. He’d see the women chatting by the well and wonder how they managed to have any time to relax.
Then his eyes would fix upon the well. The water pouring from the pump is a quiet miracle, not far removed from striking a rock with a staff and watching a spring gush forth. He’d recall that once, two decades ago, the well had been empty. Sources of water were drying up, and so was the population. Long years of degradation had desiccated the region into an Indian dust bowl. In the language of EcoTipping Points, it had suffered a negative tip – a switch from sustainability to decline.
The story of Gopalpura and the Alwar district of Rajasthan paints a dramatic picture of what EcoTipping Points are and how they work. It concerns the most basic of resources: water. It demonstrates how a “negative tip” can take a vital resource away, and how a “positive tip” can bring it back. And it shows how the ripples from a relatively small event can change an ecosystem and a community.
Nor Any Drop to Drink
Water has always been a scarce commodity in the Alwar District. Buffered by the Aravalli range against the Thar Desert to the west, it receives a scant 16 inches of rainfall annually. Most of that rain falls during the months of the monsoon, from July through September, leaving soil to parch the rest of the year.
But the people themselves had rarely faced scarcity. Indeed, the district was once known for its high water table. As late as 1890, forests covered 60 percent of the land, where peasants gathered firewood and royal families went hunting for tigers. Fields were lush with wheat, mustard and beans, and villagers and livestock alike could all slake their thirsts.
The reason was that natives had spent millennia learning how to manage water. They had developed a social order in which even religious rituals reminded them how precious it was.
When a male child is born, or when a couple get married, the village has a ceremony where they walk around the well in worship of the water,” says Murali Lal Jangid, from the village of Jamdoli. “And when a person dies, the body is cremated, and the remaining bones are brought to a religious site where there is holy water, where they put the bones. So it shows how water is related to our culture from birth to death.
Ancient Hindu scriptures mention the key technology for managing water: rainwater harvesting. All over India, people had built structures to catch and hold the monsoon rains and store them for dry seasons to come. Archeologists have dated some rainwater catchments as far back as 1500 B.C.
In Rajasthan, the dominant structure was the johad, a crescent-shaped dam of earth and rocks, built to intercept runoff. A johad served two functions. On the surface, it held water for livestock. But like an iceberg, its most important parts were below the surface. By holding water in place, it allowed the liquid to percolate down through the bedrock. It recharged the water table below, as far as a kilometer beyond the johad. Stored underground, the water could not evaporate. In the midst of the dry season, without pipes or ditches to deliver water, villagers could always count on dipping it from their wells.
A johad was more than any one family could build. It took a village. But because every villager had a stake in the johads, residents banded together to build and maintain them. The rajas, the kings of small states who gave the region its name, would often finance construction of johads, taking a sixth of the crops in return.
Community institutions extended to other shared resources. Because forest conservation was bound up with water, villagers regulated the cutting of trees for fuelwood.
After centuries of relative stability, the social contract around water and trees began eroding late in the 19th century, once Great Britain had consolidated its control over India. Crown companies were hungry for timber, and too many princes were willing to provide it. First, they declared the forests off-limits to the villagers who had tended them for generations. Later on, they sold the logging rights.
Alwar kept its forests until the late 1940s, as India was gaining its independence. The local raja, afraid of losing his lands to the new national government, let the loggers in. The venerable trees turned into railroad ties and charcoal.
The deforestation of Alwar turned out to be a negative tip for the whole district. It set off a slow-motion chain reaction in which the ruin of one resource led to the ruin of others, and the impoverishment of nature led to the impoverishment of the people.
The first wave of degradation was the loss of the trees themselves. Their destruction starved out wildlife and exposed the fertile topsoil to erosion. When the rains came, they washed the dirt down the barren hillsides. Much of it ran into the sacred ponds. Over time, thousands of them were choked with silt.
As 2,500 johads were gradually buried, a second wave of devastation spread. With fewer and fewer ponds to recharge the water table, it retreated deeper and deeper underground. First rivers ran dry, then wells.
In earlier times, villagers might have dug out the silt and rebuilt their crumbling dams. But as the government seized more and more of their common lands, they had less and less incentive to protect what was left. Where farmers had once banded together to manage their resources, now they competed over the dwindling remains. Traditional village councils, called gram sabhas, fell apart, and a tradition of communal labor washed away with the topsoil.
“After independence,” recalls Gopalpura village elder Mangu Patel, “village unity collapsed, and the people neglected their structures, because they can only be made by a group, not by individuals. So, one by one, all the structures gradually deteriorated and stopped being used.”
In place of johads, the villagers tried modern technologies to keep the water flowing. With government aid, they sank deeper wells powered by diesel pumps. But the new tube wells and bore wells ensnared them in a vicious cycle. The water table was still not being recharged, which meant the farther they drilled, the more it dropped. Large swaths of Alwar became “dark zones” on government maps, areas where the groundwater was out of reach.
Eight or ten years ago, a new tube well came to our village,” says Jangdid. “When it was new, our village was very enthusiastic, [because this meant] there wasn’t much labor necessary to get the water. They just turned on the switch and got as much as they wanted. They took so much water, they could take it 24 hours a day. But because of that, groundwater levels dropped so much, that it’s impossible to get it more than five or six hours.”
In another vicious cycle, less groundwater led to less surface water and less transpiration from plants, which produced less rain. Monsoon seasons became shorter, from 101 days in 1973 to 55 days in 1987.
The final wave of degradation was social. Before the negative tip, well water had allowed farmers the luxury of a second crop, during the dry season. Now they were down to a single, rainy-season harvest. The land could no longer support the families who lived on it, and many families had to split up.
Like Okies in America’s Great Depression, able-bodied young men migrated to the shantytowns of cities like Delhi. They sent home cash to support their wives and children. Back in the villages, women and children had to spend up to 10 hours a day fetching firewood and water from distant locations. They hauled the water home in ceramic jugs. There was no time for children to go to school.
At the very beginning, we only had two wells that had water, and another one that we had to go to was very far away,” recalls Manbhar Devi, a female elder from the village of Bhaonta-Kolyala. “There was no agriculture, except what could be grown during the rainy season. And everyone was migrating out to look for a job, either to work as agricultural or construction laborers.”
The negative tip that had denuded Alwar of its trees was finally stripping it of its hopes for the future. The downward cycle seemed irreversible. But events would show that it was not.
The Force of Feedback
Hard times in the Indian countryside might seem a far cry from the stresses and strains of an American big city. But the negative tip suffered by Rajasthanis has a lot in common with social and environmental dilemmas faced by today’s urbanites.
Many of us know them on a daily basis. It’s the unceasing sprawl of the suburbs, paving over forests and turning green fields into subdivisions. It’s the growing number of days when a brown pall of smog hangs over downtown. We’re not walking hours to haul water, but we’re spending more and more time stuck in four-wheeled boxes, commuting ever-longer distances between work, home and shopping. On a larger scale, we can hear the gloomy drumbeat of species extinctions and watch the global thermometer inching up another notch.
What all these problems share is a sense of deadly momentum. It’s hard to recall just how the ball got rolling downhill. But by now, it’s rolling so fast, we feel helpless to stop it.
We try, but many of our solutions feel like fingers in the dike, pushing to hold back the force of an ocean. Sometimes, our best efforts seem to make the problems worse. We try to clear up crowded freeways by building more of them. But more roads attract more suburban development and more drivers. Soon the new roads are as clogged up as the old.
Why do environmental challenges feel so overwhelming? What makes the process of degradation so hard to fight? The emerging EcoTipping Points model offers answers. But it also shows that our worst crises contain seeds of hope. As we understand the workings of negative tipping points, we can better understand how to create positive ones.
A tipping point is a lever that sets in motion dramatic change in a system. It’s the practical application of one of the core insights of ecology: That you can change an entire system by changing one strategic part. The small action that changes the system is catalytic. It sets off a chain reaction, a cascade of effects that build on one another until they tip the entire system in a new direction.
EcoTipping Point stories have a “before” and an “after.” Before a negative tip, the eco-social system is sustainable. It supports people, plants and animals alike. It can absorb a lot of damage and keep on meeting their needs. But a negative tip pushes the system past a point of no return. In the aftermath, the system becomes unsustainable. It won’t support the same populations it did before.
In Rajasthan, a sustainable system based on rainwater harvesting had endured for thousands of years. Kings had come and gone. Droughts and floods had destabilized the system, but it had always recovered. Villages had rebuilt their johads, and the wells had kept on flowing.
Then came a catalytic action. It happened in the 1940s, when the raja opened up the region to logging. In its “after” state, a generation later, Alwar District had sunk into chronic conditions of scarce water or none, sparse vegetation and hardscrabble farming. The population dwindled, as locals left for the cities, bringing their numbers in line with their scanty resources.
It took time for Rajasthanis to realize their wells were running dry. Unlike a tornado or a tsunami, the negative tip was a natural disaster in slow motion. By the time they began responding, their predicament was hard to reverse. They knew that their chief response – digging deeper wells – was only making tomorrow’s problems worse. But they needed the water today.
What made it so hard to turn the negative tip around? The answer is the same dynamic that makes many environmental threats appear unstoppable. It’s the phenomenon of the feedback loop.
Feedback loops are the key to EcoTipping Points. They explain the mystery of how a small-scale action can set off large-scale change.
In the simplest terms, a feedback loop is a circular chain reaction. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect. Once the loop gets started, it keeps running on its own momentum. If there’s nothing to interrupt it, it can spin out of control and become a “vicious cycle.”
A classic example transpired during the Cold War. Each time the U.S. deployed more and better weapons, it inspired the Soviet Union to build more and better weapons. In turn, the Soviet threat caused the U.S. to escalate the contest still further. The result was a nuclear arms race, a feedback loop that spiraled for decades until one of the players crashed.
The power of a feedback loop lies in its ability to amplify a small action. That’s why many of our environmental problems feel so intimidating. We’re swimming against mighty currents. We’re fighting feedback loops, which render the forces against us more and more powerful.
We can see these currents at work in Rajasthan. Once the damage had begun, a series of interlocking feedback loops made it progressively worse. A few of those vicious cycles:
Trees and groundwater. As forests were cut down, johads were choked by eroded soil, less rainwater was channeled underground, and the water table dropped. As groundwater receded, the remaining trees found it harder to survive.
Wells and groundwater. As the aquifer fell, villagers drilled deeper wells. Those wells caused the aquifer to fall even more.
Community institutions and johads. As social institutions got weaker, villagers put less work into maintaining their johads. As the johads crumbled, people spent more time gathering water and wood. They had no time for common obligations, and community institutions became still more feeble.
Once we learn to look for feedback loops, we can identify them as culprits in a wide variety of ecological and social dilemmas, large and small.
For example, farmers often find their pesticides are becoming less potent, because pests evolve resistance to the poisons. A farmer can respond by spraying more chemicals or stronger chemicals. But in time, the bugs become immune to those, as well. As the farmer keeps upping the ante, ponds become polluted and other animals get sick – including human beings. He discovers that he can never get ahead. His costs go up and up while his crop yields do not.
In the process of urban sprawl, people flee crowded and crime-ridden cities for suburban neighborhoods. But as the suburbs fill up, they often develop the same crime and congestion as the central city. Homeowners who can afford it move farther out, until urban pathologies catch up with them again.
With each move, the side-effects multiply. There’s a longer drive to get to work or play, while more countryside is gobbled up by asphalt. Like the farmers of Rajasthan, suburbanites are simply meeting today’s needs. But in the long run, they’re degrading an ever-shrinking resource in an ever-widening radius.
On a worldwide scale, climatologists have pointed out vicious cycles within the ultimate negative tip: global warming. Although human emissions of greenhouse gases are the major cause, certain geophysical feedbacks are speeding the process up.
One such loop involves polar ice, which reflects a portion of the sun’s radiation back into space. As the atmosphere gets warmer, ice caps are shrinking. A smaller percentage of solar energy gets reflected, and the air becomes a little hotter.
In parallel fashion, swelling sea levels are speeding the breakup of polar ice shelves. As more ice melts, the oceans rise relentlessly higher.
How do we resist the insistent force of a feedback loop? How can we step off an eco-social treadmill? Those might be the toughest questions we face, as environmentally-concerned citizens of our towns, our nations and our planet.
The unexpected answer might be that we don’t have to fight these feedback loops at all. In dozens of environmental struggles, citizens are using a radically different strategy. They’re using feedback to their own advantage. They’re turning the loops around. They’re creating EcoTipping Points.
A positive tip is a mirror image of a negative one. By changing one link in the chain, we can sometimes set a feedback loop spinning in the opposite direction. Or we can launch new feedback loops that work for sustainability instead of against it. Just as a negative tipping point spawns vicious cycles, a positive tipping point – an EcoTipping Point – generates virtuous cycles. It turns the system from decline to a course of restoration and sustainability.
That’s what happened when Gopalpura created an EcoTipping Point, three decades after its negative tip. As we will see, the initial catalytic action was like a pebble dropping in a pond. As virtuous cycles rippled outward, they began to reverse the cycles of despair, transforming the lives and landscapes of thousands of rural Indians. They rippled outward from a well in Gopalpura.
Return of the Johad
Water was not on the mind of an idealistic, 28-year-old doctor, when he stepped off the bus in Alwar District in 1985. Rajendra Singh was hoping to start a medical clinic.
The son of a well-off landowner in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Singh had earned a degree in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional Indian system that bolsters the body’s ability to heal itself. After graduation, he’d moved to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, and joined Tarun Bharat Sangh, meaning “Young India Organization.” The group followed a Gandhian philosophy of helping poor workers to help themselves.
But Singh was restless in the city. By day, as he worked a government job, he felt he was only teaching the needy to rely on a bureaucracy. He formed a more radical plan, to work in the most destitute corner of Rajasthan. He sold his furniture and sent his young wife to live with her parents. With four friends, he boarded a bus and vowed to ride to the end of the line. The end of the line turned out to be a village called Kishori.
Kishori did not welcome them with open arms. Five strange young men from the big city were as likely to be terrorists as social workers. After questioning and searching them, villagers relented and gave them shelter in a local temple. A sympathetic landlord in nearby Bhikhampura eventually offered them a two-room house.
Singh opened his clinic, but the villagers seemed uninterested in supporting it. He soon found out they had more pressing needs. One day, as he was walking home from nearby Gopalpura, he got a ride from the driver of a camel cart. The driver was Patel.
As the two talked, Singh learned that Patel owned 200 bighas of land, about 600 acres, in an area where the average landholding was a mere 3 to 6 acres. By local standards, Patel was a wealthy man. But he couldn’t support his extended family. He had three grandsons running bicycle taxis in the city of Ahmedabad, 430 miles away. Each made 30 rupees a day, about $2.43 in U.S. dollars. It was more than they could earn by farming.
Twenty years later, Patel still recalls that first meeting: “I asked him, ‘Why are you here, wandering around? Don’t you have any work to do?’ and he said, ‘I’m here to do some social work.’
“He had planned to work for the education of children and health projects, but I was the person who told him ‘No, the immediate need is for water. If you work for water, we will help you.'”
At age 60, Patel was old enough to remember days when the johads had been full of water instead of mud. On his suggestion, Singh and two colleagues took up pickaxes and spades and began to dig out one of the ponds.
At first, the three worked alone. But Patel offered grain to anyone who would help. In a time of drought, food was a powerful enticement to pitch in. After seven months, the johad had been excavated to a depth of 15 feet. Singh and his colleagues set down their shovels and awaited the monsoons.
Rain fell on Rajasthan. As luck would have it, the monsoon of 1986 was the region’s first significant precipitation in four years. By the end of the season, the pond was full. And something unexpected had happened. A neighborhood well, one that had long been exhausted, had begun flowing again. Gopalpura had created its EcoTipping Point.
Trickling up
Water was not all that began flowing. The rebirth of rainwater harvesting set loose a cascade of constructive forces, in Gopalpura and beyond. The effects ping-ponged from ecosystem to social system and back, and the momentum got stronger and stronger, as both systems began to heal themselves.
The first wave of effects swept through Gopalpura itself. Singh’s original pond inspired villagers to take on a bigger job: a crumbling irrigation dam. Technical advice and food for the workers were donated from outside. The residents themselves contributed 10,000 person-days of labor. By the next monsoon season, the dam was reconstructed, 20 feet high and 1,400 feet long.
One achievement kept leading to another. By 1996, a survey found Gopalpurans had built nine johads, covering 2,381 acres and holding 162 million gallons of water. Groundwater had risen from an average level of 45 feet below the ground to 22 feet. On government maps, the area changed from a dark zone to a white one, indicating a surplus of groundwater.
The ascending aquifer trickled up through the village economy. Moister subsoil allowed crops to thrive with less irrigation. Because well levels were higher, less fuel was needed to pump water to the surface. The expense of diesel fuel dropped 75 percent. The area of wheat fields jumped from 33 to 108 hectares, and some farmers diversified into sugarcane, potatoes and onions.
Many of their fields could now produce two crops, one in the rainy season and one in the dry. “Villages who are harvesting rainwater have at least two crops a year, but the villages who aren’t have only one crop or no crop,” says Maulik Sisotia, a TBS volunteer.
As people ate and drank better, so did their livestock. There were more leftover leaves and stems to serve as fodder for sheep, goats and dairy cows. The number of stands in the Alwar district selling kalakand, a sweet cake made from condensed milk, jumped from 11 to 100, selling 22 tons of milk cakes every year.
As village society reassembled, so did its basic unit: the family. Young men came home from distant cities, to work in the fields year-round. Their wives, freed from long walks for water and fuelwood, had more time for housekeeping and child care. Their daughters, no longer needed for hours of chores, had time to go to school.
“Now, there are two schools,” says female elder Manbhar Devi of nearby Bhaonta-Kolyala, “for small children and older children as well. At that time [before rainwater harvesting], not a single girl went to school. Their parents didn’t let them go to school. Now every family sends both boys and girls to school, and at least they can finish their primary education here in this village.”
With the gift of spare time, some women earned extra money through soapmaking, carpet making, spinning and weaving. If they needed seed money, they could borrow it from samuhs, revolving loan funds started by the women themselves.
Phuli Devi belongs to a samuh in Bhikampura. “They are collecting 100 rupees per month,” she explains. “And whenever we need it, someone in the collective can borrow it at a very small interest rate, say 2 rupees per month. Ten or fifteen women come together and pool their money.
“During this severe drought, whenever we need, we take the loan from the self-help group whenever we need to. And so because of this, we can solve so many problems, nobody needs to migrate from this place.”
As their quality of life improved, Gopalpura’s residents realized that their social order depended on the natural one. They had restored one resource. They were ready to bring back another: trees.
Their revived community council, the gram sabha – with participation from every family – decided to reforest 10 hectares next door. The trees would help protect the johads, by cutting down on soil erosion. They would provide fuel and feed, saving villagers another agonizing daily walk. Residents could break off dead branches for firewood, but to protect the forest from overuse, they would be fined 11 rupees for cutting green ones. Any witness who failed to report a violation could be fined, as well.
To symbolize the villagers’ commitment to their newly-planted woods, TBS adapted an old religious ritual. The rakhi was a brightly-woven bracelet, worn by family members and friends as a promise of mutual protection. As villagers planted trees, they performed ceremonies in which they tied rakhis around the trunks.
“The father of water is the tree,” says Singh, “and the mother of water is the forest. So if your father and mother are not healthy, the children will not be healthy either.”
Ripples in Rajasthan
Multiply Gopalpura by 750 villages, and you can imagine the power of an EcoTipping Point. As visitors carried the news home, other towns constructed their own rainwater basins. The practice spread further as jal yodhas, or “water warriors,” went on evangelical walking tours, called padyatras. Two years after the first johad, nine were built nearby. The next year saw 36 structures. The year after saw 90.
By 2005, TBS counted 5,000 structures in 750 villages, dotting 3,000 square miles over five districts. Alwar’s forest had spread 33 percent in fifteen years. A survey of 970 wells in 120 villages found that all were flowing – including 800 that had been dry just six years before.
Gujar Kanhaiyalal, a resident of Bhaonta-Kolyala, recalls the vivid change. “In 1985 to 1988 there was a big drought in Rajasthan. In Bhaonta there were 20 wells, but only two or three had water. But in the next drought, from 1999 to 2002, not a single well dried up.”
In Kanhaiyalal’s village, johads brought a dead river back to life. In 1990, he and his neighbors built a catchment dam across the dry Arvari riverbed. After the monsoons had filled the new basin, a small stream sprang up, downhill from the dam. It ran a few weeks. As they built more structures to recharge the aquifer, the stream ran for a longer time, until in 1995, it was running all year long. Four other rivers later resumed year-round flows.
The new rivers and watering holes attracted animals. Bhaonta-Kolyala reforested 1,500 acres of the neighboring hills and declared it a people’s wildlife sanctuary. Named after the local deity Bhairon Dev, it provided habitat for birds and mammals, such as sambar deer, nilgai antelopes, porcupines and jackals. Villagers caught glimpses of leopards, which they hadn’t seen in twenty years.
So valuable were the resurrected rivers that they drew another predator: state government. Officials had largely ignored the watershed, but now, the fisheries department claimed the Arvari’s water and its creatures as state property. It sold fishing contracts to private companies. Realizing their hard-won resource could be lost, 70 villages along the river formed the Arvari Sansad or river parliament. The body had no legal standing. But it organized mass protests and got the contracts revoked. Today, the parliament meets twice yearly to tackle new challenges.
The Arvari conflict was not an isolated problem. As villagers created new resources, they sometimes stirred up the same social forces that had plundered their old ones. But this time around, their village councils did not collapse into disunity. Instead, they got stronger. The same momentum that had restored their countryside and their communities was also restoring their will to defend them.
Two years after Gopalpura had planted trees, government officials cited residents for encroaching on public land. The state flattened the forest and slapped a fine on TBS. But after a two-year struggle, officials reversed themselves. They granted the village an additional 10 hectares, along with 10,000 rupees for tree-planting.
TBS defied the state again in the early 1990s. In the heart of Rajasthan lay a national park called the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Its long-time residents were building johads, but their wells were not filling up. The problem turned out to be illegal marble mines, which were sucking the groundwater dry. In spite of threats from the “marble mafia,” TBS sued to close the mines. More than once, Singh and other organizers were beaten by hired thugs. But the group finally won a Supreme Court order, shutting down 471 pits. Villagers got their groundwater back, and more tigers roamed the reserve.
As recently as 2001, the state ordered TBS members to destroy a dam at Lava Ka Baas village or face arrest. The residents, however, would not let the bulldozers near. For two months, they held a vigil over the structure, night and day. In the end, authorities backed down.
Today, the water warriors of Rajasthan are confronting the government on a national scale. In 2002, the national government announced a plan to help 100,000 villages with no water source. The plan would spend up to $125 billion on a centralized network of canals and pipelines, to hook up 37 river basins. Much of the money would come from private companies. Just as Alwar’s forests had been snatched from the public domain, the nation would hand over vast quantities of its water to corporate ownership. Farmers would have no control over its availability or its price.
Singh has a different vision. He maintains it’s far cheaper to help villages create and control their own water supplies than to build more gargantuan dams and ditches. TBS and other groups have joined in a National Water Convention and a national walking tour, setting foot in 30 states.
Singh compares his peaceful warriors to another independence campaign, 70 years earlier, when Gandhi made spinning wheels and homemade cloth or khadi into symbols of a self-sufficient India.
“If Gandhi were alive today, what would he be doing?” says Singh. “Instead of using the khadi as the symbol, he would be making johads, because today the biggest exploitation is groundwater mining and the commercialization of water.”
From Vicious to Virtuous
The water wars are not raging only in Rajasthan. As the planet’s population tops six billion, and 35 percent are critically short on water, there’s more and more pushing and shoving worldwide over who will get their share.
Even in the world’s wealthiest country, conflicts are erupting over resources like the Ogallala Aquifer. This underground sea, stretching beneath America’s Great Plains, has dropped an average of 10 feet a decade, shrinking irrigated land by 20 percent. Farmers are fighting a proposal to draw it down even faster by piping the water to big cites like Dallas and El Paso.
If we look at these stories through the lens of EcoTipping Points, we can see that each region is in the midst of a negative tip. Water is scarce, and feedbacks from human activity are making it scarcer.
Rajasthan shows us how we can turn such vicious cycles around. As the positive tip unfolds, it sets off feedback loops that run in the opposite direction from the negative tip that preceded it. In Alwar, the same forces that were running the region into ruin changed course and began to build it back up:
Trees and groundwater. The rise in the water table encouraged villagers to protect their gains by planting trees. Their canopies and their roots reduced soil erosion and siltation of johads, allowing more rainwater to seep underground and raise the water table.
Wells and groundwater. As the aquifer got closer to the surface, villagers needed less water for irrigation. They pumped less, allowing their wells to fill even faster.
Community institutions and johads. As villagers built johads, they revived gram sabhas to manage them. As these village councils grew stronger, they planned, built and maintained more johads.
None of these virtuous cycles would have started without a catalytic action to set them in motion. In Rajasthan, that action was Singh’s excavation of the first johad.
The EcoTipping Point, the strategic piece of the system that was changed by Singh’s act, was altering the landscape to channel the runoff of rainwater. Instead of washing uselessly down the gully, the water had a chance to seep slowly into the ground. That small change was enough to turn the villagers’ relationship with the aquifer upside down. After years of taking too much water out of the land, they began to put it back.
It’s like a bank,” says Singh. “If you make regular deposits, then you’ll always have money to withdraw. If you are just taking, then you’ll have no money in your bank account.”
Once the wells started flowing, a chain reaction followed. The villagers saw rapid results from their work. Because they got a quick payback on their labor, they were inspired to build another dam, and another.
To put it in the language of EcoTipping Points, the catalytic action set off a short feedback loop. The loop had four parts:
- By changing the landscape, Singh changed the water table.
- Raising the water table, in turn, raised the levels in the wells.
- The wells improved the lives of the villagers.
- The villagers were moved to change the landscape still more, closing the loop. The virtuous cycle went around a second time, as they built a second johad, and kept on spinning.
In most positive tips, the initial feedback loop is a rapid one. The shorter the loop, the faster momentum can build, and the faster the changes can multiply. Success breeds success.
The multiplication of johads was just one of the rich array of virtuous cycles that spun off from Alwar’s original positive tip. Some loops revived ecosystems. Others boosted local economies and social institutions. Some brought back old traditions. Others created new ones, bringing new occupations and opportunities for local women.
Rajasthan’s story illustrates how ecosystem and social system depend on each other, as feedbacks bounce back and forth between society and nature. Villagers learned that the best way to restore their human habitat was to restore natural ones. And those natural habitats had slid so far, from forest to near-desert, that they needed human helping hands to recover.
Other loops have been geographic. Expanding patiently from village to village, in twenty years rainwater harvesting has touched the lives of 700,000 people. As people relearned the art of self-government, they moved from village institutions to regional ones, like the Arvari River Parliament. As India debates water policy, Rajasthan’s story is becoming a model for the whole country.
Perhaps the most crucial feedback loops were psychological and spiritual. As they built up their futures, stone by stone, villagers were also recharging their collective pride. From being victims of history, they became water warriors.
“They feel, ‘We have given our work to this, so this is ours,'” says Sisotia. “So they maintain it regularly, and they have a feeling of ownership. It’s natural if you participate in something, then you are very caring about it, so it should not be damaged.”
Just as feedback loops make negative tips so hard to resist, they can generate staying power for positive ones. For Gopalpurans and their neighbors, that power was strong enough to battle back against the very government forces that had overwhelmed them a generation before. They learned that their positive tip was self-sustaining, and their eco-social system was sustainable.
Lessons about EcoTipping Points from the Rainwater Harvest Story
- Strong local democratic institutions are both a prerequisite and a result of successful catalytic actions. In the communities which had not formed Gram Sabha, (independent village councils), the construction of the johads either failed or were less successful than those which created them. The labor-intensive work of building johad and planting trees demanded unity and commitment from the beneficiary communities. This cooperative effort in turn strengthened village solidarity. This is significant as strong communities are better equipped to deal with powerful interests who are in a position to exploit newly created assets such as regenerated forests or groundwater. In this case, revival of the Arvari and other rivers attracted the attention of the state government. It began offering licenses to commercial fishers, but the villagers mobilized and successfully blocked this action. This prompted villages sharing the Arvari basin to form an Arvari Parliament to coordinate use of the river and prevent further power plays from outside or within.
- Initial short feedback loops – -or quick results – -motivate and inspire people toward further action, even if the longer-term process of “tipping” ultimately involves more effort. The johads began yielding results within one to three years of construction. In the context of development, fast results are an important motivator as resources are few and people may be too impoverished to make choices for the long term. The construction of johad increased water levels in wells after the first monsoon, which fulfilled immediate needs. This provided encouragement and stimulus to build on the early successes by making improvements on other areas of the watershed through repairs to existing structures, bunding, terracing, planning of more johads, or reforestation efforts.
- EcoTipping Points involve natural and social forces doing much of the work. While construction of johads was labor-intensive, once completed, natural processes took over when monsoon rains caused water to be captured and to quickly percolate into the soil, raising the water table and village wells.
- A perceived sense of crisis will motivate people to act. Lack of water was pushing people toward the edge of malnourishment, leaving them vulnerable to crises such as drought, and forcing able-bodied people into cities for work, children out of school, and women on increasingly longer walks to find water sources. While the villagers knew that this was a priority, there was no sense of collective organization to strategize and find solutions to the problem. When TBS came to work on health care and education, a village elder pointed out that long-term necessities were unthinkable in the face of the urgent need for water. By identifying the problem, TBS was able to focus on this higher priority, and eventually enlist support of the villagers in a way they were not able to with their previous development projects.
- The EcoTipping Point draws on both social and ecological memory. Reviving the tradition of building johads was possible as elders in the village remembered when they were still used and maintained, and were able to offer accurate knowledge of the technical aspects of construction, such as the location, height, and position of the johad. The local custom of “shramdan” or voluntary labor, was crucial in getting the johads built with limited resources. As TBS expanded its operations, other traditions such as padyatra, or foot marches, were key in spreading the message to other villages. Johads had evolved to suit this hilly terrain, and so these features of the landscape helped to capture and store rainwater underground, especially when combined with reforestation of native species.
Feedback Analysis of the Rajasthan Rainwater Harvest Story
Autor: Gerry Marten
The negative tipping point in this story was commercial logging concessions granted by the rajahs shortly before India’s independence. A system of vicious cycles was set in motion by the ensuing cascade of effects:
- Logging reduced the forest’s protection of the watershed from soil erosion. Soil erosion and the sediment load in rainwater runoff increased. More sediment was deposited in johad ponds, reducing their capacity to channel water to the aquifer. With less water input to the aquifer, the water table slowly dropped. Trees and other vegetation died when the water table fell beyond reach of their roots. The loss of vegetation led to even more erosion and sediment in the runoff.
- Villagers compensated for the drop in the water table by using tube well technology to dig deeper wells. That lowered the water table even further, forcing the digging of even deeper wells.
- More sediment deposition in the johad required more labor to remove it. This, and the fact that the water supply was shifting to deeper and deeper tube wells, reduced the villagers’ motivation to maintain the johad. As they fell into disrepair, the johad gradually went out of use along with the social institutions and technology for maintaining them.
- Eventually the water table was so low that even the deepest tube wells were drying up. So did the irrigation water necessary for dry-season agriculture. Men moved to cities to find work, leaving villages without the labor supply needed to maintain the johad. This accelerated decline of the johad and depletion of the aquifer even further.
As can be seen in the diagram below, the four vicious cycles listed above were interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The end result was disappearance of the johad and loss of the local water supplies and village forests. Women and children were cast into a nightmare of walking long distances to collect water and fuel wood. Children had no time for school, and women had little time for other family responsibilities and economic activities.
The positive tipping point was the restoration of a single johad in Gopalpura village, along with restoration of the traditional gram sabah village council to manage it. The ensuing cascade of effects reversed three of the feedback loops in the negative tip, transforming the vicious cycles to virtuous cycles:
- Water soon returned to wells near the johad, stimulating the villagers to restore more johad. The technology and social institutions for restoring, maintaining, and building new johad, evolved as more johad were put into service.
- The water table rose, filling more wells and restoring irrigation agriculture. Men moved back to the villages, providing the labor necessary to restore, build, and maintain even more johad.
- With the water table once again close to the surface, the villagers planted trees to restore the village forest. The forest not only provided fuelwood but also reduced soil erosion, reducing sedimentation of the johad and making them easier to maintain.
The virtuous cycles continued until all village wells were flowing and the village locked into a sustainable water supply. Women and children no longer had to spend long hours getting water and fuelwood. Children returned to school and women returned more attention to family and economic activities. A new virtuous cycle was set into motion when people from other villages heard about the success in Gopalpura and came to see what happened. Johad spread to hundreds of villages.
The Water Problem
Historically a water-rich country, India is now facing a water crisis. Changes such as the Green Revolution, economic growth, and urbanization have all put enormous pressure on its freshwater resources. With 16% of the world’s population but only 2.45% of the world’s land area and 4% of the world’s water resources, India’s demand for water is outstripping its supply. Meanwhile, the population is increasing by 19 million every year, the equivalent of a new Canada every year and a half. Half the nation’s inhabitants are expected to make a drastic demographic shift to urban areas by 2050.
The Central Groundwater Board of India projects that the reservoir of groundwater will dry up by 2025 in up to 15 states if the current rate of exploitation continues. Punjab state is estimated to have already used up 98% of its groundwater, which means that if current trends continue, this breadbasket of the nation could turn into a desert. Moreover, water distribution is dramatically unequal: from 9000 millimeters of rainfall in Meghalaya in the west of India to 100 millimeters in western Rajasthan in the east of the country. The reservoir of groundwater, estimated at 432 billion cubic meters, is rapidly being depleted with major metropolitan centers estimated to go dry by 2015.
Water scarcity is a familiar subject in the media and has become a major political flashpoint. Conflicts, sometimes violent, have erupted at all levels – -between states, regions, urban and rural areas, upstream/downstream populations, and along national borders. Sometimes conflicts surface along ethnic lines, as between the Bishnoi and Bill peoples of Rajasthan. While many of the ethnic conflicts are rooted in complex historical, ethnic and religious issues, scarcity now plays a critical role. Some of the major hotspots which simmer under the surface in years of stability and erupt in years of scarcity are the conflict between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu state over the Cauvery River Basin; between India and Pakistan over the Sindh river; and historical conflicts between India and its downstream neighbor Bangladesh over the Ganges and Bramaputra Rivers. Bangladesh blames Indian mismanagement of the Ganges for floods which repeatedly washed through the country.
Under pressure from multilateral development banks, the Indian government has tended to look for solutions in markets and large-scale, costly infrastructure. Dams, diversion projects, and the controversial plan to interlink the major rivers have been widely criticized for displacing and impoverishing villagers, wreaking havoc on wildlife, and pushing India further into debt. South of Rajasthan in neighboring Gujarat state, the notorious Narmada dam has been the subject of international campaigns because of its astronomical costs and its flooding of villages that is expected to displace over a million rural dwellers.
Rainwater Harvesting in Rajasthan
Against the backdrop of urban water shortages and increasingly volatile friction over water sources, the groundbreaking revival of traditional rainwater harvesting initiative in the arid state of Rajasthan has received nationwide attention.
Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is not new to India; in fact, it has been a major source of irrigation on the subcontinent for centuries. Archeological evidence of water harvesting tanks date back to around 1500 BC, and reference is made to them in ancient texts. One study cites evidence of sophisticated irrigation systems and hydraulic structures that used water harvesting as early as 5,000 years ago. In the medieval period rulers in southern parts of India financially supported the construction of village-level structures for rainwater harvest or storage running into the tens of thousands.
Traditionally water and forests were seen as intimately linked. Both were bound up in spiritual and social traditions which forbade cutting of trees or misuse of water. The Rajasthani people co-evolved rainwater harvesting traditions that practiced water conservation so that their naturally arid region did not translate into water scarcity. Water was considered sacred, and an “amrit,” a nectar or ambrosia. Around communal ponds, people tied threads around the trees in worship of them. Various ceremonies marking important milestones in family life such as births, deaths and marriages often involved water or some kind of ceremony around the village well. It is also common for daily offerings of water to be made to the deity of the village temple. In the forests people believed deities lived in the trees. In Sariska, people saw the degradation of the forests by the destructive mining activities as a sign of anger from the gods with rain and water being withheld from them as punishment. The Peepal and Banyan, their sacred trees, would not grow, because there was no water or sand to hold them. They also believed deities were angered by the blasting and dumping that were disturbing the animals that lived there.
Despite regional variations, these beliefs and practices prevailed in the region for centuries, if not millenia, until the 19th century. Changes started to take place with the arrival of colonial Britain and accelerated after Independence. Control of formerly communal forests and water resources were taken over by centralized authorities. Based far away and with no local ties, they had little interest in or understanding of local conditions. They frequently opened these resources up to exploitation by commercial mining and logging companies. Over the years, the dependence on government to manage their resources eroded traditional communal management institutions and people lost their sense of stewardship for their village forests and watersheds. Wooded areas became denuded and overgrazed, and water harvesting structures became neglected.
The State of Rajasthan is the second largest in the country, covering 34.3 million hectares, over 10% of the total geographic area of India. It comprises 5% of the country’s population. It is divided into 30 districts, which are further divided into blocks. There are 15.7 million hectares of arable land. It is among the driest states, with total surface water resources only about 1% of India’s total surface water. All rivers are rainfed, with 14 major river basins and 59 sub-basins. Surface water is found mostly in the south and southeast of the state. There is a large area in the west which has no distinct drainage basin. The scarce water resources are distributed unevenly temporally as well, with most of the rainfall occurring during the monsoon. Large-scale infrastructure, such as dams, reservoirs, and diversion canals are available to about 30% of the state’s population, but not without significant social and environmental costs. Groundwater mining is causing water tables to drop up to a meter per year in some areas.
Rajasthan is a historically and culturally rich region, and was once home to very wealthy merchants and maharajas. It is located along the trading routes where camel caravans crossed the western part of the state. There are various ethnic groups in Rajasthan, speaking Hindi or Rajasthani or, because they are similar, a patois of both. Hindu is the dominant religion, followed by Islam. One major ethnic group is the Rajputs, warrior clans known for their bravery, whose dynasty peaked at the beginning of the 16th century . They were overtaken by the Mughal Empire but struggled for independence as the Mughal empire declined. Allying themselves with the British, they managed to remain an independent state, but during the ensuing extravagance and escalating corruption their wealth and privilege were squandered. Today it is one of the poorest regions in India. The female literacy rate is lowest in the country, with 1.7% compared to 87.8% in Kerala in the south. The child labor rate, on the other hand, is high.
The Negative Tip
The Alwar District lies northeast of Jaipur in the northeast part of Rajasthan, covering an area of 8,380 square kilometers. It has a population of nearly two million people, living in 1,991 villages and five towns. It is divided into eleven blocks, or administrative subunits. It was a princely state during the pre-Independence period, merging with the Indian union in 1949 with the birth of Rajasthan. The area is at the northern edge of the Aravalli mountain range that extends from south Rajasthan to Delhi. Its climate is semi-arid with an average rainfall of 350-400 mm distributed unevenly throughout the season. It is mainly an elevated, rolling plateau interrupted by the hills and rocky ranges of the Aravallis. Thought to be one of the world’s most ancient mountain ranges, geologists say the Aravallis belong to the pre-Cambrian period of 1,500 million years ago. The ranges run from Delhi to near Ahmadabad in Gujarat state, with peaks rising in the southern portion to about 6,000 feet near Mout Abu in Raja. The mountains are composed mainly of shrub lands with forests of dry, deciduous vegetation. They provide habitat for endangered species such as the panther, leopard, and four-horned antelope. Forest cover is the best in Rajasthan and covers 10-15% of the district.
The main inhabitants of the region are the tribal Gujjar, Balai, Rajput, Kumar and Meena. The main sources of livelihood are agriculture, mainly staple crops such as wheat, mustard and pulses, and livestock such as cows, buffalo, sheep, goats and camels. The crops and animals often vary depending on the ethnic group. Landholdings are small, averaging between 1.5 and 2.5 hectares in area. In the forested areas, there is less agriculture and more emphasis on minor forest products. Houses are made of stone, mud, and thatch.
Ironically, the Alwar District was once locally known as “naha,” meaning an area with a high water table. This was due mainly to the practice of harvesting rainwater. Unfortunately, just prior to Independence, a wealthy prince sold off logging rights to the local forests. They were subsequently cleared without the consent of the people whose livelihood depended on them. Although the changes that occurred in the region over the years are a result of complex interacting forces, this act of clearing the forests set in motion a wide-ranging web of effects. First, it caused severe soil erosion during the monsoon. Rains ran off the mountains and land and escaped, carrying topsoil into water tanks. As they lost their de facto ownership and sense of stewardship of the forests, villagers became alienated from their long established communal forest management institutions. Since water and forest management were inseparable to the people, this also eroded their water conservation practices. Water harvesting structures silted up and became neglected. At the same time, state control of water resources created a further disincentive for villagers to maintain their traditions. They became increasingly dependent on the distant bureaucracy to provide water sources in the form of wells, diversion canals, and water harvesting structures. These were essentially ill-conceived projects foisted on villagers without their participation and without in-depth knowledge of local conditions. As such neither the government nor the villagers themselves properly managed or maintained them.
Paradoxically, as the natural resources began providing less of their formerly reliable services, pressure on them intensified. Wells were dug deeper to capture receding water. This “groundwater mining” caused water tables to fall further. This in turn reduced crop yields to one harvest per year and lowered livestock productivity. It also increased the workload of women, who were walking much longer distances to find water sources. Once self-sufficient villages were pushed into the cash economy as able-bodied men left the countryside for towns and cities in search of work. This out-migration put an added population pressure on growing cities as well as eroding the social fabric in the villages. Absent men contributed little to the upkeep of their community, increasing the pressure on women and female children to care for children and the elderly in addition to the normal farming, household, and water fetching responsibilities. With falling crop yields, food security for villagers and livestock was low, and forested areas were overgrazed by hungry livestock. Increasingly, destitute villagers were clearing forests and grazing malnourished livestock. Despite the fact that they may have been aware of the long term unsustainability of their actions, they were forced to focus on daily survival needs.
The Positive Tip
Around this time, 1975, a small youth organization known as Tarun Bharat Sangh (Young India Organization), or TBS, formed in response to the destruction wrought by a fire on the campus of Rajasthan University. A group of volunteers came together to offer assistance, medical help, food and shelter to the victims of the fire. After this initial project, the group decided to stay together and shifted their attention to rural development. They began to learn about poverty in the villages, and the impact of the Green Revolution and economic liberalization on villages.
In 1984 they moved into Bhikampura village in the Alwar district with the goal of introducing some health and education programs. The villagers were skeptical. Jaded by the misguided efforts of outside aid organizations, they had little faith in TBS’s vision of development. An older wealthy farmer from the neighboring village of Gopalpura, Mangu Patel, told TBS worker Rajendra Singh that they didn’t need hospitals and schools, they needed water. At that time, the region was in the midst of a severe drought. Village wells had dried up completely, and urban migration had reached a peak of 3-4 people from each family. Patel offered to show him how to repair a used traditional water structure known as a johad – – a water harvesting structure that traps the monsoon rains, recharging the groundwater that supplies the village wells. It was difficult to get younger village men to volunteer their labor to the project, as it meant giving up wages in town. Finally a “test case” on an existing johad was launched with the technical help of the irrigation department. Within two years, the results of the work were apparent. The monsoon of 1986 came and went, leaving water tables higher for a longer period of time than before. This prompted the villagers into the more ambitious task of masonry repair of an irrigation dam. The same engineer gave them further guidance along with encouragement from TBS. For this project, some villagers sent for family members working in the towns. The structure was completed in time for the 1987 monsoon. This success sparked interest in neighboring villages. The next year, more new structures were built or repaired. Eventually critical mass was achieved, and today there are over 10,000 johad water harvesting structures in the region. Badri Prasad, a local landlord, eventually donated some land near Bhikampura village to TBS. Over the years this headquarters has grown from a two-room building to a complex which houses an Ayurvedic clinic, guest house, kitchen and administrative office.
Because the villages lie along the Aravalli mountain range, the topography is complex. One study, “Johad” (1998) states that “it would not be right to make any statement regarding the exact increase in ground water level.” At the same time, it acknowledges that “Johad construction plays a major role in recharging groundwater.” It cites a survey collaborated on between TBS and Action for Food Production (AFPRO) which was conducted first in 1988, which suggested that out of 970 wells in 120 villages, only 170 wells were operational and the rest were dry. The same team conducted another survey in 1994, 6 years later, and found that all 970 wells were in use and supplying water year-round. Another evaluation report suggests that in the regions harvesting rainwater, groundwater has risen by 20 to 50 feet in 10 years. A TBS study finds that between 1987 and 1997 in Gopalpura, where the project started, the water column of the village wells increased during the monsoons from 15 feet to 55 feet. Dry season levels also increased from 10 feet in 1987 to 35 feet in 1994.
Spin-Offs
Just as the deforestation of the hills caused the social system and ecosystem to slide into an unhealthy stability domain, this catalytic action of building the water harvesting structures has had multiple spin-offs. First, it significantly improved the quality of life for the women. Freed up from the drudgery of walking many kilometers to fetch water, women had more time and energy to spend on priorities such as health and child care. Female children, no longer needed to help their mothers at home, began to go to school. With a year-round supply of water in wells, new fields, formerly “wasteland,” were opened up for cultivation and a second – -and sometimes even a third – – annual crop were added. This dramatically increased food security. When the water table is higher, less diesel fuel is used for the pump to extract the water, so fuel use is reduced. Also, high groundwater levels mean less water is needed to irrigate cropland.
Meanwhile, with livestock able to drink from johads, and with more agriculture, there is more crop residue to be used as fodder for animals. In this way the health and productivity of livestock improved. With this extra income and security, and new responsibilities for men in the villages, migration to the cities slowed down. This has helped restore family and social bonds, and has relieved some of the agricultural burden on women who were compensating for absent family members.
Among TBS and villagers awareness grew of the need to protect and regenerate the forests to prevent soil from silting up the newly built johads. This rekindled a holistic perspective and began to revive forgotten communal forest and water management institutions. It also recreated a sense of ownership among villagers who had now invested their energy and time into these resources. It motivated them to come together against the power structures that were threatening them. In the region’s Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary, marble mining had seriously impacted the forests and water supply. The villagers living in the reserve joined forces with TBS to oppose the mining and stop poaching, and in 1991 successfully managed to stop mining in the reserve. This has helped the water tables to rise, the forest to regenerate, and has increased the amount of wildlife in the sanctuary, including the endangered tiger.
An unexpected result of the rise in groundwater levels is the revival of two seasonal river basins, the Arvari and the Ruparel, which now flow nearly year-round. When the government of Rajasthan sold a fishing license to a commercial fisher, villagers united in opposition and forced it to rescind the license. This prompted all the villagers living in the basin of the Arvari to form the Arvari Sansad, or Arvari River Parliament, to make rules on its use and take measures to protect it from other outside interests. Some villages also began their own independent councils, where they discussed the water and forest resources and set up regulations governing their use.
These developments have had benefits which reached from the ecosystem into the social system. The solidarity and confidence gained by the villagers, encouraged by TBS, have triggered the launch of other projects and village councils that regulate the use of water and forest resources. At least one member from each household is part of these village councils, or Gram Sabha. While they can create regulations governing use of water and forests and enforce penalties, they are not recognized by the government and have no legal power outside the village. An example of rules governing forest use, for example, is the limits on areas where people may bring animals for grazing. Sometimes certain areas of the forests are off-limits for given periods, or the age of the trees may be used as limits for particular animals. For example, sheep are allowed only after trees are tall enough for their leaves to be out of the reach of the sheep. Similarly a cow would not be allowed in a given area until trees grow out of their reach, while longer periods would be given for camels, and so on. Some Gram Sabha have also set up a village fund, or Gram Kosh, which is put towards village maintenance or investment in income generation or other future projects. This has given villagers the financial means to achieve common goals.
Another democratic structure emerged after the revival of the Arvari River in 1994, when villagers realized there was a need to protect the newly revived river from commercial interests. After banding together to successfully defeat efforts by the Fisheries Department to issue a fishing license to a commercial fisher in 1996, they went on to form the Arvari Parliament. The parliament is made up of 70 villages along the river basin, with one or two representatives from each village. Currently there are 150 members, 30 of whom are female. The parliament normally meets for two consecutive days every six months. These biannual meetings are held in different places each time, usually in a village which is facing some water or forest management problem. This provides motivation and inspiration to the host village as they hear members from other villages share their success stories. Outside of these regular meetings, a core group of 22 meet more frequently. One coordinator and two vice-coordinators are nominated every five years, but the membership can decide to change the coordinator if they’re not satisfied, or if he/she misses more than two meetings, as sometimes happens.
With the Gram Sabha and the Arvari Sansad, the villagers have de facto control over the river and forests. For the time being this reinforces the institutions of communal management. However, because they do not have official government authorization of this control, there is always the possibility that they will lose these rights should the government or commercial interests enforce a claim to them.
The emergence of women’s Self-Help Groups has had a huge impact on the community. A group of village women contribute a certain amount of money to a pool and deposit it into a cooperative bank. This acts as a “revolving credit” fund where whoever needs it can borrow money at low interest. They must then pay it back as quickly as possible for the next person to borrow it. The resulting increase in solidarity and entrepreneurship among women has encouraged them to play a more active role in this deeply patriarchal society. Some of the micro-enterprises developed include soapmaking, selling milk and milk products such as ghee, carpetmaking, spinning and weaving. Improvements have been made to education and health care. There has been a shift in priorities away from the conventional symbols of progress such as electricity and roads, and towards self-sufficiency, reinforced by the summer padyatras, or foot marches, which promote this value. There have also been some changes in socially oppressive customs. The dowry system, ostentatious, costly weddings, purdah where women must cover their faces and stay inside, and child labor in the carpet industry have all been actively discouraged. As community cohesion strengthened in Gopalpura, they became the first village to give up the making and consumption of alcohol and it is still today a “dry” village.
Replication
TBS and villagers have disseminated their approaches in several ways based on using local customs. One of these is known as the foot march, or padyatra, which has very old roots in India’s spiritual traditions. In the past, people would wake up early, around 4 a.m., and make a “morning march,” walking door to door through the villages singing religious songs to wake up, for example, Krishna, or whatever gods, goddesses, or nature-based spirits were locally worshiped. Sometimes it is also symbolic of awakening not only the body but the spirit. Pilgrims who had a religious message would walk from village to village to disseminate it. Gandhi used and popularized the foot marches as he went through the villages mobilizing them against the oppression of colonial rule, and one of his disciples, Vinoba Bhave, used them during his famous land redistribution movement where he managed to get rich landowners to donate over a million acres of land to landless peasants. Politicians also use the padyatras as a way to get rural votes.
TBS has been involved with three kinds of padyatras. One starts at the beginning of summer, one comes at the start of the monsoon (technically July) during the Rakshabandan festival, and another in October. The people joining the march, the “padyatris,” are made up of available TBS workers and other people somehow related to the particular area or village where the padyatra was held. The march begins in one village, where the group stays a few days, and then moves on to the next one as a group. In each village there are ceremonies, cultural events, and discussions on whatever the subject of the march is. If the region chosen is very large, sometimes they break up into groups. Within 40 days they go from village to village. Depending on the distance between villages, anywhere from 15 to 50 villages may be visited.
Funding for the work of building rainwater harvesting structures is usually divided between TBS and villagers, who contribute a quarter to a third of the costs in cash or in kind. Generally the contribution TBS makes is for contracting skilled work such as masonry or specific engineering tasks. Over the years, the contribution of TBS has contracted as that of the villages has expanded. Physical labor is provided by people in the recipient villages. Sometimes villages have a system where grain contributions are sold by the Gram Sabha and the proceeds put toward johad construction or other projects.
TBS receives funding from various sources, from both groups and individuals. It has also been funded for specifically-designed projects by various agencies in Europe, as well as the Ford Foundation, OXFAM India, and some government agencies such as the national Department of Science and Technology, and the state Watershed Department. Sometimes TBS has solicited the contributions of local business. There are some 50 full-time TBS workers, about 200 part-time workers, and hundreds of volunteers spread out across villages in Alwar and neighboring districts. Many are either from villages or stay in the field long-term, returning to the Bhikampura campus from time to time. A few staff members and volunteers also stay at the campus year-round. Rajendra Singh won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community in Leadership in 2001. At the campus there is a showcase with various other awards displayed in it. The award given to Bhaonta-Kholyala, the “Down to Earth Joseph C. John Award” in 2000 is documented on the painted map of the water harvesting structures in the village (see photos). TBS continues in its work in the villages but has increasingly extended its reach into the arena of advocacy and influencing policy on water and the environment. It has been instrumental in the formation of a nationwide coalition of civil society groups called the Jal Rasthryia, National Water Coalition, with Rajendra Singh as the head.
Challenges
There will always be important challenges that threaten to derail the progress made in this district. Every time new assets are created, a fresh dilemma emerges over how to manage these assets and protect them from powerful interests from both outside and within. As well, the relationship between various government agencies and these newly mobilized villages has been rocky. It’s important to note that “the government” is not just one entity but a vast array of individuals and agencies among layers of bureaucracy from forest rangers, local police, Gram Panchayat (the elected village councils, different from the self-organized village councils or Gram Sabha), the irrigation department and engineering staff from the latter. A few have been sympathetic from the beginning (like the engineers who donated their technical assistance to repair the first johad in Gopalpura), some have initially been unsupportive but over the years have come to trust and work in partnership with TBS (like the forest rangers of the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary), and others may remain unsupportive if not outright hostile still today. Worse, the bureaucratic tangle of fragmented administrative and legal entities has created ambiguity and confusion for all communities and organizations doing water-related projects. For starters, the Drainage Act (that says that all groundwater and runoff is the property of the state), the Fisheries Act, and the Panchayat Raj Act all have conflicting definitions of both control and ownership of water resources. At the national level, the overlapping Ministries of Rural Development and Agriculture, and the underfunded Ministry of Environment and Forests all work haphazardly at cross-purposes with little coordination among them. As one article states, “In India, water seems to be everybody’s turf but nobody’s responsibility.” Nevertheless, TBS has received financial support from government agencies at the state and national level, and gradually over the years relations have thawed somewhat.
TBS members and villagers have been threatened with arrest, fines and even violence on numerous occasions. In 1987, they were given a notice which quoted the Irrigation Drainage Act, saying that no stream or canal water could be stopped as it “belonged to the government.” Villagers and TBS protested that the rain belonged to them and all they were doing was stopping the rainwater from draining away. In 1989, the Alwar district administration slapped a fine of Rs 5,955 (US $150) on Rajendra Singh for planting trees on government land. They fought this for two years, saying that they were planting trees not for any one individual’s benefit but for the common good. In the late 1980s, Rajendra Singh said about legal 377 cases were brought against TBS workers, although he never went to court over any of them as they all collapsed on their own. The legal maneuvering simply strengthened their resolve to continue their work. There were also three rape charges against Rajendra Singh later dropped as baseless. He was also accused of poaching tigers in Sariska, but on the day he was said to have been seen in the reserve, he was in a meeting with government officials about building water harvesting structures.
While building structures in the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary, the government used the Wildlife Protection Act against TBS workers, saying that they were illegally building ponds on forest land. But after realizing the decrease in poaching and noticing the positive changes in the reserve, one official requested them to continue their work, and Rajendra Singh asked for some authorization that they could do so without fearing future accusations of breaking the law. The official, risking a jail term, gave his authorization. This was a groundbreaking change between forest officials and TBS. Their relationship has changed over 17 years from being antagonistic to cooperative. During their campaign to close the mines in Sariska, TBS’s coalition brought a petition to the Supreme Court against the mining, and the judge ordered 417 mines to be closed. At this time they faced intense intimidation by the agents of the mining companies, known as “the mining mafia.” They were attacked three times, once in the presence of a retired judge. Because of this, one miner was sent to jail for contempt of court. There was also criticism that TBS’s efforts were insensitive to the needs of workers from the mines who were local villagers who depended on the mining income. However, this ignored the important reality that these mine laborers were formerly farmers or herders forced out of their livelihood due to destruction of their resource base by activities such as mining to begin with. Because life in Bhikampura had become tense and difficult, a padyatra was begun in October of 1993 from Gujarat to the Delhi ridge, which was able to boost the eroding morale of workers. As recently as 2001, the government requested TBS to destroy one of its water harvesting structures at Lava Ka Baas village or face arrest within seven days although no warrant was issued. The people held a vigil over the structure, and two months later the government backed down. In the article “Water Harvesters of Rajasthan,” journalist David Nicholson-Lord writes that Rajendra Singh explains the government’s antagonistic attitude by saying that “officials were hostile to johads because there was no rake-off for them and because self-governing villages are hard to manipulate.”
In a more ominous incident in June of 2002, Rajendra Singh was badly beaten up at a public hall in Aligarh town in Uttar Pradesh State, where he had been invited by a chapter of the Society Towards Ecological Protection to talk about water harvesting. In his speech, Singh talked about how people should depend on their own power and not the government to solve their water problems. During the question and answer session, a man known as Tejvir Singh got up and attacked him as the horrified audience, his young son among them, was forced out of the building by thugs who had accompanied Tejvir Singh to the lecture. An unconscious Singh was rushed to hospital where he spent several weeks in the neurosurgery ward under treatment for a blood clot in the brain. Police caught and arrested the assailant, a known criminal with strong political ties, who had already been implicated in cases of murder, assault and fraud. He has since been imprisoned where he remains today.
Another issue which has implications for the future is the commercial interest in regions rich in groundwater for industrial purposes. Because there is no legal protection to villages who have invested their resources in recharging groundwater levels, they would not be entitled to payment for the use of this water, say, through the generation of royalties. This is relevant because within the last decade the central government has issued notices to medium and major industries to relocate production from the Union Territory of Delhi in an attempt to control pollution and reduce pressure on the environment. As Alwar is outside of the Union Territory but accessible to Delhi, there has been an increase in construction of industrial units along the Delhi-Alwar highway and more projects are being planned, with industries looking to buy land at rates well above market rates. Some of the big farmers have been trying to motivate other farmers to take advantage of this opportunity, with some villagers reporting that the price offered for their land is ten times higher than the market rate.
Another area of concern is the lack of female participation in the village councils or Arvari Parliament. While efforts are being made by TBS staff and villagers to include more women, social norms and customs are strong limiting forces. Of course, responsibility lies on the men to encourage and support the women, and also on women to override these social conventions. There have been some real changes in this regard over the past two decades, but because men and women’s knowledge systems are different, their inclusion in decision-making needs to be made top priority. In “Bhaonta: A Village Wildlife Sanctuary,” Ashish Kothari writes, “Another… concern, though not articulated by the villagers themselves, is the lack of involvement of women in the decision-making. The gram sabha meetings are almost always exclusively male affairs. Women undoubtedly influence decisions via their husbands, but their absence from the direct participation may not be conducive to the kind of participatory decision-making that villagers pride themselves for.”
These challenges will continue to require flexibility and innovation on the part of the village networks and supporting organizations and of course, TBS. Conditions in the Alwar district vary from village to village, and life in this poor region is far from ideal. Change is frustratingly slow and has required patience, courage, and imagination at all stages. There are also the added obstacles–sometimes life-threatening – -thrown up by the government and private sector, who will likely continue to do more of the same. The pressure of modernization will have as yet unseen impacts on this region. And of course conflicts and power struggles exist at the local level as much as anywhere else.
It’s not clear whether community cohesion and social action would have mobilized spontaneously or as quickly without the trusted presence and perseverance of TBS members although many of them do come from the villages themselves. Nevertheless, this case has shown how a society can avert socio-ecological crises such as urban flight, famines or resource-based conflicts, and is a rare, living example of alternative development and sustainable, self-sufficient rural existence.
Feedback Analysis of the Rajasthan Story
Autor: Gerry Marten
The negative tipping point in this story was introduction of commercial logging. A system of interconnected and mutually reinforcing vicious cycles was set in motion by the cascade of effects from the logging:
- Logging reduced the forest’s protection of the watershed from soil erosion. Soil erosion and the sediment load in rainwater runoff increased. More sediment was deposited in johad ponds, reducing their capacity to channel water to the aquifer. With less water input to the aquifer, the water table slowly dropped. Trees and other vegetation died when the water table fell beyond reach of their roots. The loss of vegetation led to even more erosion and sediment in the runoff.
- Villagers compensated for the drop in the water table by using tube well technology to dig deeper wells. That lowered the water table even further, forcing the digging of even deeper wells.
- More sediment deposition in the johad required more labor to remove it. This, and the fact that the water supply was shifting to deeper and deeper tube wells, reduced the villagers’ motivation to maintain the johad. As they fell into disrepair, the johad gradually went out of use along with the social institutions and technology for maintaining them.
- Eventually the water table was so low that even the deepest tube wells were drying up. So did the irrigation water necessary for dry-season agriculture. Men moved to cities to find work, leaving villages without the labor supply needed to maintain the johad. This accelerated decline of the johad and depletion of the aquifer even further.
As one can see in the diagram, the four vicious cycles listed above were interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
The end result was disappearance of the johad and loss of the local water supplies and village forests. Women and children were cast into a nightmare of walking long distances to collect water and fuel wood. Children had no time for school, and women had little time for other family responsibilities and economic activities.
The positive tipping point was the restoration of a single johad in Gopalpura village, along with restoration of the traditional gram sabah village council to manage it. The ensuing cascade of effects reversed three of the feedback loops in the negative tip, transforming the vicious cycles to virtuous cycles:
- Water soon returned to wells near the johad, stimulating the villagers to restore more johad. The technology and social institutions for restoring, maintaining, and building new johad, evolved as more johad were put into service.
- The water table rose, filling more wells and restoring irrigation agriculture. Men moved back to the villages, providing the labor necessary to restore, build, and maintain even more johad.
- With the water table once again close to the surface, the villagers planted trees to restore the village forest. The forest not only provided fuelwood but also reduced soil erosion, reducing sedimentation of the johad and making them easier to maintain.
The virtuous cycles continued until all village wells were flowing and the village locked into a sustainable water supply. Women and children no longer had to spend long hours getting water and fuelwood. Children returned to school and women returned more attention to family and economic activities. A new virtuous cycle was set into motion when people from other villages heard about the success in Gopalpura and came to see what happened. Johad spread to hundreds of villages.
What Does the Rainwater Harvest Story Tell Us About EcoTipping Points?
- Strong local democratic institutions are both a prerequisite and a result of successful catalytic actions. In the communities which had not formed Gram Sabha, (independent village councils), the construction of the johads either failed or were less successful than those which created them. The labor-intensive work of building johad and planting trees demanded unity and commitment from the beneficiary communities. This cooperative effort in turn strengthened village solidarity. This is significant as strong communities are better equipped to deal with powerful interests who are in a position to exploit newly created assets such as regenerated forests or groundwater. In this case, revival of the Arvari and other rivers attracted the attention of the state government. It began offering licenses to commercial fishers, but the villagers mobilized and successfully blocked this action. This prompted villages sharing the Arvari basin to form an Arvari Parliament to coordinate use of the river and prevent further power plays from outside or within.
- Initial short feedback loops – -or quick results – -motivate and inspire people toward further action, even if the longer-term process of “tipping” ultimately involves more effort. The johads began yielding results within one to three years of construction. In the context of development, fast results are an important motivator as resources are few and people may be too impoverished to make choices for the long term. The construction of johad increased water levels in wells after the first monsoon, which fulfilled immediate needs. This provided encouragement and stimulus to build on the early successes by making improvements on other areas of the watershed through repairs to existing structures, bunding, terracing, planning of more johads, or reforestation efforts.
- ETPs involve natural and social forces doing much of the work. While construction of johads was labor-intensive, once completed, natural processes took over when monsoon rains caused water to be captured and to quickly percolate into the soil, raising the water table and village wells.
- A perceived sense of crisis will motivate people to act. Lack of water was pushing people toward the edge of malnourishment, leaving them vulnerable to crises such as drought, and forcing able-bodied people into cities for work, children out of school, and women on increasingly longer walks to find water sources. While the villagers knew that this was a priority, there was no sense of collective organization to strategize and find solutions to the problem. When TBS came to work on health care and education, a village elder pointed out that long-term necessities were unthinkable in the face of the urgent need for water. By identifying the problem, TBS was able to focus on this higher priority, and eventually enlist support of the villagers in a way they were not able to with their previous development projects.
- The ETP draws on both social and ecological memory. Reviving the tradition of building johads was possible as elders in the village remembered when they were still used and maintained, and were able to offer accurate knowledge of the technical aspects of construction, such as the location, height, and position of the johad. The local custom of “shramdan” or voluntary labor, was crucial in getting the johads built with limited resources. As TBS expanded its operations, other traditions such as padyatra, or foot marches, were key in spreading the message to other villages. Johads had evolved to suit this hilly terrain, and so these features of the landscape helped to capture and store rainwater underground, especially when combined with reforestation of native species.
Appendix 1: Visit to Tarun Bharat Sangh in March 2005
Autor: Amanda Suutari
Some new information from our most recent visit to Rajasthan:
Sariska Tiger Sanctuary: In January 2005, the news broke that there have been no tiger sightings in the Sariska reserve and that 18 tigers are reported missing in Ranthambore (another tiger sanctuary in Rajasthan), putting it on red alert. This crisis has gotten a lot of media attention which sparked public outrage, prompting the central government to order the Central Bureau of Investigation, the CBI, to set up a task force to launch an investigation. As suspected, poaching has been found to have played a major role, with a gang of poachers admitting to having killed at least 10 tigers between 2002 and 2004.
Differences in Landscape between last visit (December) and most recent in March:
The change in season between late December and mid-March is visually dramatic. In December, the fields were bright green and full of mustard and wheat. This has now all or mostly been harvested, and the landscape is brown and dry, the water level in the johads is lower. This is important in that it highlights how influential first impressions can be.
TBS Manual: This was a book published by TBS that we picked up in Hindi which describes finer details of the technical aspects of johad construction as well as legal details on a specific Act related to common forest and water management in India. One section of diagrams showed projections of major trends of land use, resources and farming in the Alwar district (described below). Trends without intervention:
- Agricultural land is expected to increase while pastureland and forested land will decrease.
- The status of sacred groves (forested land on the temple grounds) will deteriorate.
- The average level of education will rise.
- Goat/sheep herding will gradually replace other livestock, for example cows and buffalo, which means farm animals will be replaced by machinery, and so the amount of organic fertilizer will also decrease.
- The amount of rainfall will decrease.
- The population will increase.
Johads as explained by Gopal Singh, TBS worker who works mainly with hydrology and johad construction in villages: Normally a half to one-kilometer area experiences groundwater increases with the construction of an average-sized johad. A johad begins to yield results between one and three years after it is built. A third of the costs of the labor come from the village, and the rest from TBS, although through successive projects the villages contribute increasingly large amounts and some villages, like Bhaonta-Kolyala, are self-sufficient. The average johad costs about 70,000 rupees (about 1,600 US dollars), takes about 30-40 people 3 months to build (or about 60 work days). The average wage for one eight-hour day of work is 60 rupees but it may also be higher or lower depending on how light or heavy the work is. The number of workers can go up to 100 and sometimes camels, tractors or other machinery are used.
For the crescent-shaped embankment, a trench is dug and new soil taken from a deeper place is put in the area and compacted with a machine. Sometimes rocks are used under the surface for extra stability and drainage. Small trees are planted on the embankment to further stabilize it. For overflow, a weir (or overflow channel) is dug from just above one of either of the ends of the crescent-shaped embankment. Otherwise a stone structure is set directly into the embankment itself, whose level is lower than the embankment to allow overflow to release. This is a “safety valve” so that the structure is not damaged by overflow caused by heavy rains.
Johads are normally made from earth because it is a locally available material which costs nothing but labor. One bag of cement, on the other hand, costs 150 rupees, or approximately three days of work. This highlights how much more cost-effective it is to use local materials wherever possible. Also, villagers are more self-sufficient in this way because if stone or cement is used, they would have to depend on skilled professionals for repair jobs.
According to Mr. Singh, one of the main differences between TBS-built structures and those initiated by the government is that the TBS-assisted johad are technically better designed for a particular site in terms of structure, size and location in a way that government johads are not. Also, the social institutions are in place before the work is undertaken, whereas the government does not put priority on community participation. Without any sense of ownership over the johads, villagers are not motivated to maintain the structures.
Some problems/challenges: Some obstacles or challenges TBS and villagers face are political factions eroding village unity, the educational system being removed from the practical realities of everyday village life, and technical problems such as how to dig spillways in sandy or rocky soil. Sometimes TBS projects have failed if they have started prematurely, i.e. before proper creation of a village council.
Why haven’t some villages adopted the TBS model when they’ve had the opportunity to?
Either there is a lack of social organization in the village, or little trust in TBS’s process.
Is there a difference between villages who harvest rainwater and those who don’t?
One difference is that in the villages that don’t, there is a high level of pesticide use among farmers. Possibly they reject TBS’s values of Gram Swaraj, village self-sufficiency, including use of natural fertilizers, which is the focal point of one of the three padyatra TBS organizes.
Village Councils (Gram Sabha): (According to Ghopal Singh, TBS worker)
- In the report the creation of Gram Sabha was included as something which emerged after villages began working together on water and forest management. This is not completely accurate, at least with the TBS-associated villages. TBS works only with villages which have functional Gram Sabhas. Their creation becomes the entry point for work on water or forests.
- Classification system of personality types in the Gram Sabha. According to Mr. Singh, Gram Sabha members can be put into roughly five types:
- Charismatic: good speakers, visible personalities but who ultimately lack substance
- Very passive herd-followers: will only take action when critical mass is acheived
- Generally decent: well-meaning people who make the right noises, but don’t take initiative
- A leader: well-respected and possessing vision and clarity.
- Brave, courageous risk-takers but may not necessarily show good judgement
Certain pairings of personalities can either be very productive or destructive (as with the first and fifth type). Gram Sabha members are given this model and asked to consider where they fit, as a way for them to understand some of the common group dynamics in the Gram Sabha meetings.
Our Site Visits
The first day we were together with a group of panchayat (district council members) from different states who had come to get a very introductory taste of the work in the area. Gerry wrote down the names of the places. We visited about 5 sites. The johads we saw were much larger than average. One was very old, very large, and had been built before British occupation and was still in use. We also visited a village tank attached to a temple, which had a wetland in the middle of it. People used the tank for bathing and washing clothes.
The next day we visited Gopalpura village, the village where the first johad had been repaired. We were taken around by a local man who lived in Bhikampura who spoke no English. We had a map which gave us a rough layout of the village. Gopalpura was located in roughly a basin shape, with highlands on the north, east and west sides. Many of the johads or other structures were located in the north, which captured water in successive intervals. Some structures also captured runoff from the east and west sides. The fields were separated by ‘med bundi’ (the local name for bunds, or raised columns of earth arranged in terracing patterns to hold runoff on the fields). The village was largely southwest of the fields and structures.
In the full report from December, I mentioned that I did not see any children begging. This may have been because this behavior is situation-specific. In the December visit, I was the only foreigner accompanied by TBS workers or villagers known to be closely involved with TBS work. Although the curious kids flocked around us then, they didn’t beg. However in Gopalpura village where Gerry, Ann and I were accompanied by only one man from a nearby village, we were soon followed by several boys, who, while cute, became quite cheeky and aggressive, asking for a few rupees every ten seconds or so. This continued until we left the village. The kids knew that begging would not be tolerated in the first situation; in the second, absent of similar social constraints, this might have been normal, even expected, behavior. As Gerry said, “They’re working.”
Appendix 2: Notes from an Interview with Gopal Sing (TBS Engineer) in March 2005 – Gerry Marten
- Fifty years ago there was plenty of water. Main crops: rice and sugar cane. Then the water table declined, wells dried up and only rainfed agriculture was possible: dal, chick peas, mustard, and some vegetables such as cash crops. Farmers were forced to expand cultivation onto grazing lands not suited for agriculture. Before they used draft animals (oxen and buffalo), but now draft animals are decreasing, while sheep and goats are increasing. They sell the wool and export sheep/goats to other parts of India for meat. Most of the local people are vegetarians.
- Before, the people were self sufficient, but they became more and more dependent on employment (adult males) in cities. A bad situation. Now many are returning to the villages.
- Before, they got medicine, seedlings, and wood from trees. No timber left. Now only fuelwood and leaves for goats.
- Everyone has some land, but some only have enough for their houses and not for farming.
- Many johads were built by government (past and present), but are not working because: Wrong location, poor construction, or no maintenance ~ When government builds johad, it gives money to people for labor but doesn’t check for quality of the work. TBS doesn’t pay money until work is done properly ~ Government johads are often poorly located because choose the place based on what wil benefit the village headman or his cronies.
- There was deforestation under the British, but it accelerated after independence. Before independence, forest lands belonged to villagers, who used and managed them. After independence, forest lands belonged to the government, which started selling timber rights. People then started cutting as much as they could because they had no stake in the forest. Before, there was a king (local rajah) who made rules and enforced them. After independence, there was a loss of local authority in the king. The government made rules but nobody enforced them or paid attention to them. Religion and sacred groves declined.
- Johad requires slope and right kind of soil. Can’t do it in some parts of India.
- Some strengths of TBS: Increase ground cover on the watershed to reduce siltation of johads ~ Re-initiate or strengthen village cooperation. Gram sabha went down after 1970, but TBS has revived them ~ Helps to establish and maintain village cooperation in other areas (e.g., watershed and forest management).
- Problems: Factional politics in villages. Factions now going to court instead of discussing their local problems ~ Starting johads with a village that is not ready socially. This has wasted a lot of money. TBS requires gram sabha organization before working with a village ~ Social conditions such as alcoholism, dowries, and child labor. TBS now requires a pledge of no alcohol, dowries, or child labor before working with a village ~ Some professionals (e.g., engineers, doctors) can’t relate to villagers and work with them ~ Educational system doesn’t teach them practical things and makes them feel that they shouldn’t have to do manual labor ~ Soil too sandy for dam to hold up when there is overflow ~ Soil not suitable for bypass construction.
- Main reason villages don’t do TBS: Too many factions ~ No community organization.
- TBS strategy is to try to get village types 4 and 5 (described by Amanda) working together.
- TBS has learned from villagers: Technical knowledge about water ~ Traditional medicine. (Rajindra Singh is interested in traditional medicine because he was originally a doctor.)
- At monthly gram sabha meeting people review what good has happened and discuss mistakes.
- Forest management: Gram sabha makes rules and can impose fines or punishments ~ Forest management is part of TBS package. TBS initiates making forest rules after building johad ~ The forest improves if there is discipline in the village. Otherwise it deteriorates. Village factionalism is a problem.
References
- “Sacred Water and Sanctified Vegetation: Tanks and Trees in India.” Pandey, Deep Narayan, Indian Forest Service, 2000.
- “Johad: Putting Tradition Back into Practice.” UN Inter-Agency Working Group on Water and Environmental Sanitation, 1998.
- “The Promotion of Community Self-Reliance: Tarun Bharat Sangh in Action.” Dr. Margaret Khalakdina, OXFAM India Trust, 1998.
- “Regenerating of Forest.” Professor Mohan Shrotriya, TBS, 1998.
- Parmar, Aradhana. “Health and Clean Water: Rainwater Retention Helps Green Rajasthan.” 2003. Women and Environments, Online link
- Shresth, Swati. “Forest Conservation and Water Harvesting in Bhaonta-Kolyala Villages, Rajasthan, India.” 2000. Online link
- Infochange Water Resources Homepage Archives. “India In For Severe Water Crisis: Planning Commission.” Online link
- Kothari, Ashish. “Bhaonta: A village Wildlife Sanctuary.” The Hindu Survey of the Environment, 1999. Online link
- Sebastian, Sunny. “The Water Man of Rajasthan.” Frontline, Volume 18, Issue 17 (August 18-31, 2001).
- Kalyani. “Water Crisis Threatens India, Warn Experts.” One World South Asia. Online link
- McCulley, Patrick. “Rainwater Harvesting Transforms Lives.” The International Institute for Sustainable Development. Online link
- Jaitly, Ashok. “India’s Water Crisis.” Business India, 8-21 December 2003. Online link
- Maps of Rajasthan and its districts
- Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS)
- Rajendra Singh, Avari – The river – A peoples movement (Rajasthan rainwater harvest) Online link
- Anil Agarwal et al., 2001, Making Water Everybody’s Business: Water Harvesting in a New Age, Center for Science and Environment (Delhi, India). Online link
