Drinking Water Management: A Rural Transformation In Rajasthan

AIM

The Rajasthan Association of North America (RANA) and Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) are collaborating on rural transformation of villages in Rajasthan through water management, waste management, entrepreneurship, and education development by and for the villages.

The first phase of the rural transformation is to build a replicable and sustainable water management system for water in the villages of Rajasthan. The system will be modelled and prototyped at the BITS campus. . Once perfected, the prototype will be replicated in a nearby village.

THE PARCHED LAND

More than two thirds of India’s population, over a Billion, lives in rural and semi-rural areas. Rajasthan, the largest state, has a population of 54 million, spread over its 32 districts and 41,538 villages. Of the 32, 11 districts are desert districts with chronic water shortage. The state itself is drought prone: It experienced 40 droughts during the last 52 years. In 2000-2001, 31 of the 32 districts faced acute shortage of water. A large number of villages, estimated 30,583, had over 50% deficit crop yield, jeopardizing the lives of nearly 32 million people.

The water table has dropped by 20 feet in last 10 years . About 30% of the hand pumps have gone dry. Women have to walk long distances, often miles, to fetch water. According to Additional Relief Secretary, about 26,000 villages will face problems due to water shortage this year. For the lack of water, it is feared that 50% of the livestock could be lost. Farmers are abandoning cattle and migrating to cities.

WATER MANAGEMENT PROJECT

The enormity and criticality of the drinking water shortage lead to several silo schemes that underscore human ingenuity and ‘can-do” spirit. The most illustrative of these individual schemes are, for example, the once implemented by Magsaysay awardee Mr. Rajendra Singh of the Tarun Bharat Sangh and by Mr. Laxman Singh of Laporiya village in Duda district of Rajasthan. Under daunting adversity, they paved the way. Mr. Singh, in the Gandhian style, won the confidence of the local people and mobilized the local resources to realize his vision. The replication of this scheme awaits another Singh. Should we wait? Or be inspired by Henry Ford’s manufacturing genius to make the automobile available to every American! Or by Sam Pitroda’s commitment to make the telephone available at every street corner!

Mr. Singh’s effort is synonymous to that of the Wright brothers’ first flight. It took several decades of advancements, thereafter, for commercial navigation to become a reality. The RANA and BITS initiative is a commitment to deploy technology, low-cost materials, and modern water management methods to devise a scheme that is replicable and self-sustainable. Quickly, BITS will engineer a low-cost pragmatic prototype for rainwater harvesting and well replenishing (RHWR). Once perfected for economic viability, environmental friendliness, and village-level maintenance, the RHWR will be implemented in a nearby village with a population of 5,000 or less. The village will serve as a showcase for the replication and sustainability.

The RHWR scheme is comprised of harvesting both the rooftop and surface rainwaters. BITS will engineer a low-cost grid of drainpipes to collect the rooftop water, deploy local materials for tankas, nadis, and channels, devise indigenous schemes for filtering the water, and build a bored-pipe system for recharging the ground water table at a depth of 100 feet or, if necessary, more. As a supplemental or emergency system, BITS will engineer a scheme to collect and store the rainwater at the surface level both for drinking and non-drinking usage.

Periodically, selected wells will be monitored to estimate the degree to which the ground water table is being recharged. The data will be fed into a computer model, for example, to regulate the rainwater flow automatically, to increase depth of the bored pipes, to limit the rate of water out flow, or to increase area for collection. The goal is to build an empirical model for the effectiveness of the recharging scheme and for regulating water supply.

The sustainability goal requires a revenue stream to accompany the RWHR. Such a revenue stream, it is envisaged, can be built by plantation. BITS would devise multiple plantation schemes that are practical.