In 1985, Rajendra Singh quit the cocoon of a government job and the considerable comforts of the Rajasthani city of Jaipur for rural development work in the Indian outback. Medicine and literacy were all very well, villagers said, but what they needed first was water. So he learned traditional water-management skills, dug ponds with his hands, braved cudgels and hundreds of legal writs – and last year won the Asia-wide Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership/
How do you bring a dead river back to life?
Using traditional rainwater harvesting systems, especially johads. They catch the rainwater that would otherwise flow away unused, and allow it to percolate down and recharge the groundwater below. We didn’t start out with grand ideas of reviving rivers. We were just aiming to meet local needs – which were severe. This part of Rajasthan suffered rampant deforestation in the 1970s. The Ruparel river was completely dry, the soil had dried up, and many people had migrated.
Advertisement
How did you get involved?
Originally I was an Ayurvedic physician, working in the Indian system of medicine. In 1985 I was coordinator of a government adult education project in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. I saw village after village emptying because of the water shortage. I was a member of a non-governmental organisation working on rural development – at that time quite small – called Tarun Bharat Sangh, the Young India Association. Five of us decided to go to Thanagazi in Alwar district. It was what the government engineers call a “dark zone” – it had no groundwater.
How did your family react to that move?
There was tension in the beginning. My father already thought I was a useless fellow for spending time on social work. When I gave up the security of the government job, the pension and everything, he was livid. He said it was bad enough having a useless son, now he had gone mad. My wife was angry, too. It took me two years to convince her of my sanity. But she moved to live with me in the wild lands. She has taken on responsibility for some of the work, and takes care of my health and my schedules. And now the family is proud that the “madman” has done the unimaginable and brought water to thousands of villages, despite droughts year after year.
What did the villagers think of you when you arrived from the city?
In the beginning, they mistook us for terrorists, seeing our beards. Then an elderly man pointed out that terrorists were unlikely to choose a village in Rajasthan that had no food to eat, nor water to drink. They let us stay in the local temple. It took time to gain the villagers’ trust. I started an Ayurvedic dispensary. My colleagues began work on education. But a man called Mangu Lal Patel told us bluntly that the villagers did not want medicines or education. They needed water first.
I was hesitant. I told them I was not an engineer, that I did not know much about water. Mangu said that, more than engineering, this kind of work needed a firm resolve. It was Mangu who taught me how to dig a pond. I understood the water problem only when I had to walk miles to get drinking water for myself. And dirty water at that. Slowly we formed a local unit of the Tarun Bharat Sangh at Bhikampura-Kishori village. Two of my friends left, saying they could not work like me – digging ponds with my hands. We worked with the women and elders who were left behind in the village. It took us three years to build our first johad.
What does a johad look like?
Imagine a semicircular pond, collecting the run-off from the tiny streams and rivulets in a much wider area. Our first one was about 5 metres deep, with an area of between 100 and 200 square metres, and had a catchment area of 100 hectares. Now it has water all the year round. We adopted farming methods that needed little water, and left as much as possible to recharge groundwater reservoirs. The aquifers started filling up and the water level came up to the river bed. Soon the water started bursting forth in small springs. These springs joined to form the Ruparel river again. And we have revived the Arvari river too. It had shrunk to a tiny rivulet.
How did you learn to build johads?
The farmers taught me. How you harvest water depends on your objective, the geography, topography, catchment area, pond area and soil type. You need soils with high retention capacity. These are things that you have to learn by living with local communities who know the area best. Our communities use earth science principles to recharge the groundwater. We also build small ponds and lakes and check dams on rivers, plug gullies and make bunds [embankments] along the field contours to stop soil erosion and water loss.
How much does it cost to build a johad?
Between 100,000 and 500,000 rupees ($2000 to $10,000), depending on the size. The first one was built with my efforts. Today, the local contribution is up to 90 per cent. Rajasthan has had drought for the past five consecutive years. But there is no migration from the region around the Ruparel and Arvari rivers. The water that had flowed away in flash floods is now accumulating underground. Farmers’ crops are growing and there is fodder for their cattle.
So why the opposition?
In the beginning the power brokers and moneylenders – those who mistakenly think that economic empowerment of the poor means loss of their riches – were against me. And the government engineers felt illiterate villagers had no right to enter their domain of construction. They questioned the technical features and safety. Bureaucrats felt that ponds cannot be built without their permission. Politicians worried that if communities start doing water work themselves, then who will vote for them?
When we built our first johad, the state irrigation department issued warrants for its removal under the Irrigation and Drainage Act of 1954. I told them we cannot stop rain falling on our land. Last year the people of Lava ka Baas village built a pond to collect run-off water. The area became green and farmers started growing vegetables. But the act forbids stopping the flow of water. The state irrigation department sent earth-movers to demolish the water-harvesting structure. How can the government come between nature and people like that?
So the government claims ownership of water?
No king in history has claimed to rule over water. They only had rights in water management. Government alone cannot own water. Civil society has a right in water management but even it does not own water. Nature owns water. Before they lost their rights over common land and forests, these communities had a rich tradition of building johads and other rainwater harvesting structures. With government centralisation, the johads were neglected and allowed to die.
You know, Jaisalmer in the west of Rajasthan – the last town before the border with Pakistan – is in one of the driest areas in the world. Yet 100 years ago it was India’s major trading centre. It had twice the population it has today, and 15 times more camels. It survived on a traditional water-harvesting system. But now society has become indifferent as it thinks that water is the responsibility of the government that collects taxes. Only when a community realises that it owns water will it treat it with care and stop misusing it.
The government’s new National Water Policy does mention community involvement, and calls water a “national asset”. Is there a contradiction there?
Communities should manage their water resources and the government should help them. In a democracy, it is the duty of the government to make sure every person has drinking water. If the government is unable to provide it, it should take help from communities. They can work together. The government should have declared water a common natural resource.
Is there a role for the private sector?
Government has failed in water management. So it is handing over to the private sector. Fine. But what private sector? Communities or multinational corporations? If multinationals gain control of water, they will squash the rights of the poor. The National Water Policy implies water privatisation. That would spell doom for society.
If the solution is so simple, then why has the government gone for huge dams and irrigation projects?
Maybe because big projects mean more money and more scope for corruption
Are you against such schemes? You also support the protests against the dams on the Narmada river in Gujarat and neighbouring states.
It is not a question of big or small structures. Small projects are not automatically sustainable either. Sustainability comes with a sense of community ownership and participation. Big dams displace a lot of people and raise issues of equity. You have to think hard, and go for such projects only if there is no other option.
It is the modern engineers who destroyed the traditional water-harvesting systems. The new technocrats and scientists have not concerned themselves with nature and ecology. They are intellectual giants, experts in calculations and research. But more problems arise when you seek solutions without understanding the underlying circumstances. Consider massive, centralised schemes like the Indira Gandhi Canal. Is this wise in a desert state like Rajasthan? There are problems with increasing soil alkalinity and rises in malaria due to water logging and waterborne diseases like diarrhoea. No local would have advised such a canal here.
Why this clash between traditional and modern systems?
Traditional knowledge is dismissed as unscientific. But what’s really unscientific is not trying to understand local agro-ecology-climate dynamics, local culture and needs, and soil characteristics. Our scientists think problems should be solved by any means necessary. But they looked only at the benefits of their schemes, not the harm. You should not dismiss everything emanating from illiterate villagers as unscientific.
But you’ve suffered far worse than being dismissed …
Our work on forest conservation in Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan became an explosive issue. We tried to create water sources for wildlife in local forests. From 1986 to 1988 the government issued 370 notices against us for infringing the Wildlife Protection and Forest Conservation Acts. There were five tigers when we started work in Sariska. Today there are 27. We also initiated community-based conservation work for the benefit of the jungle, the forest dwellers and the wildlife. All that came to naught when the government opened a quarter of the Sariska area to marble mining. We went to the Supreme Court. Mine owners made three attempts on my life. Thankfully, the Supreme Court imposed a ban on mining.
Then at a public meeting at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh in May I said that if the government does not help, one should learn to help oneself. A district functionary, a local political leader, thought I was inciting the public to disobedience – and decided to teach me a lesson by beating me with a stout stick. The doctors say my skull fractures are slowly healing.
So does the Rajasthan experience apply to all India?
It definitely can. It is the only way to bring water to all. Gujarat has started this kind of work. So have Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. We need to replace these alienating laws with measures like incentives for saving water. When a community stands up, then the government, bureaucrats, technocrats and politicians start backing away. There has been a lot of change in the past six months. Now everyone, including the Prime Minister, talks about water policies.
The battle over water will be the biggest battle in the future. People will always bicker with those upstream and downstream over water rights and use. Such disputes can only be resolved if we sort them out together. Probably we need river basin organisations, across borders where necessary. They don’t have to be massive bureaucracies. They should comprise all stakeholders – the state and the communities. The members can evolve laws through consensus. l
Last year you received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership, a high honour in Asia given in memory of the third president of the Philippines. Was the change in attitude anything to do with that?
After the announcement, the government talked it over with me. The litigation is over. And the award boosted the confidence of local people. It came around monsoon time last year. So the people started celebrating with abandon – saying it was their victory.
In 1985, Rajendra Singh quit the cocoon of a government job and the considerable comforts of the Rajasthani city of Jaipur for rural development work in the Indian outback. Medicine and literacy were all very well, villagers said, but what they needed first was water. So he learned traditional water-management skills, dug ponds with his hands, braved cudgels and hundreds of legal writs – and last year won the Asia-wide Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership