This DROUGHT is sponsored by Govt. of India
it was a meeting with an amazing lesson. The subject was rainwater harvesting. But the message was one on governance. And a truly stark one. If only India could learn from it.
Since the release of its book Dying Wisdom: The Rise, Fall and Potential of Traditional Rainwater Harvesting Systems in 1997, the Centre for Science and Environment ( cse ) has been advocating the importance of rainwater harvesting. Simply because its potential is enormous. A mere 100 mm of rainfall when captured on one hectare of land gives as much as one million litres of water. Therefore, there is no village in India, I repeat, no village, which cannot meet its drinking water and a reasonable part of its irrigation needs through rainwater harvesting . And the same goes for airports, railway stations, cantonments, industries with large estates, and a whole lot of institutions. Today, cse itself ensures that not a drop of rain goes out of its premises. Through simple engineering structures, in a normal year, its 1,000-square-metre land area collects seven lakh litres of water which go straight into the bowels of Mother Earth to recharge the depleted groundwater reserves.
But clearly, the acid test of the potential of rainwater harvesting will be the drought season when there is a desperation for water, people are fleeing homes, and those who remain behind are digging the riverbed for a pot of water. So when I heard that a serious drought had gripped Rajasthan, Gujarat and western Madhya Pradesh, a region in which many communities have undertaken rainwater harvesting, Down To Earth's reporter Manish Tiwari went to see how these villages were faring as compared to those which had not undertaken water harvesting previously. Manish returned extremely excited. While neighbouring villages were desperate for water and many villagers were beginning to flee, he said, the water harvesting villages not only had water to drink but also some water to irrigate their crops. The concept of rainwater harvesting was thus standing my acid test to the extent that people are saying that after this drought many communities will demand support for water harvesting programmes.
Overall, the news was and remains bad. Gujarat was already suffering a serious drought in September when the elections took place. And not surprisingly, it saw slogans like