"DYING WISDOM: Rise, Fall and Potential of India's Traditional Water Harvesting Systems," the Fourth Citizens' Report published by the Centre for Science and Environment on the State of India's Environment is being released through public meetings in fifteen different cities all over India in the months between March and June 1997. The report is result of a mega effort by CSE and its partners from all over India. The report was released by the Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh Justice Prabha Shankar Mishra on 10th March at a public meeting in Hyderabad. Smt. Sonia Gandhi released the report in Delhi on 11th March in Delhi. in Leh, the report was released on 12th March by Shri Thupstan Chhewang, Chairman and Chief Executive Councilor of Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council. On 22nd March, Shri Anna Hazare released the book in Pune at a public meeting. In Cochin the report was released on 25th March by Justice K.K. Usha of Kerala High Court. On 29th March, the Chief Secretary of Gujarat released the report in Ahmedabad. Next day, the Madhya Pradesh Minister for Agriculture and Cooperation Shri B.R. Yadav released the report on Indore and announced at a public meeting that the state government will publish the report in Hindi for wide dissemination among the rural people. Public meetings are being held in Madras and Bombay on May 6 for release of the report.

This 400-page report is the product of five years of research focusing exclusively on India’s water harvesting traditions. It’s key message is: building mega dams and crisscrossing the country with myriad canals cannot be the answer to India’s spiraling water crisis. The Indian communities have, down the ages, developed a wide array of techniques to harvest rain water. "They require small amounts of money and can be built within months instead of years like the large dams," says Anil Agarwal, Director, CSE, "And in terms of the water they can store their potential is tremendous. If 5 percent of India’s land area, about 15 million hectares, was used to store water at an average depth of 5 meters, India would be able to get 37.5-75 million hectare meters of water, depending on the rainwater collection efficiency ranging from 50 to 100 percent."

India has had a tradition of water harvesting which is more than two millennia old. While India gets a high amount of rainfall it is not evenly spread across the year. So elaborate community-based water-management systems had evolved through the years with the people at the focal point. The British rule began the process of laying this enormous heritage to waste. In their drive to wrest the maximum revenue from this rich land the British steadily impoverished the rural communities. The net result: destruction of their resource management systems, including the centuries-old water harvesting structures. The post independence bureaucracy, unfortunately, only hastened this process. Now, India, after having gone through an extended 50-year phase of constructing dams and canals, is once again being forced to look at it’s traditional, small-scale water harvesting systems. The report argues that until and unless the policy makers grasp the basic tenet which underlies these traditional systems-- that water must be harvested where it falls--all attempts to combat the water problem is bound to come to a naught.

The report cites a number examples in recent times where the traditional method of water management has come to the rescue of the people, while modern technology just failed to deliver the goods. Sukhomajri, the tiny village nestling in the Shivalik hills in Haryana is one such case. In 1979 a debilitating drought swept across India and the villagers of Sukhomajri were left bereft of even the only monsoon crop that they managed to raise in normal circumstances. But PR Mishra, a soil conservationist working in this region had earlier in that year worked with them to build a small earthen dam across the seasonal stream that ran through the village. And this saved the day. Channels were dug leading water from the tank to the fields, giving birth to a pioneering village-based natural resource management system which has since inspired many Indian environmentalists and village workers.

The Tarun Bharat Sangh have constructed some 1200 johads in the Alwar district of Rajasthan. They have not only brought respite for the water-starved local population, but has rendered at least two of the local rivers--which dried up after monsoons each year-- perennial.

The report is full of such examples of colourful and widely varied systems of water management. Of the kuhls in Jammu, kuls in Himachal Pradesh, guls in Uttarakhand, pats in Maharashtra, zings in Ladakh, zabo in Nagaland, eris in Tamil Nadu, keres in Karnataka, surangams in Kerala tanksa, kundis, bawdis and jhalaras in Rajasthan and virdas in Gujarat. It describes how the communities in different regions responded to the local geo-climatic situations and threw up systems of water harvesting . The systems that were ecologically sound and at most places socially equitable. It was because of these that the communities dwelling in and around Jaisalmer region , which has the least amount of rainfall in India, had enough water to sustain themselves in 1987, when the country was in the throes of the worst drought of the century. Different systems took care of Cherapunji, the wettest spot on earth. Today, both Jaisalmer and Cherapunji figure in no-source areas in government records, as the local water harvesting systems have slowly but surely fallen apart.

The report stresses that strength of these traditions of management lie in that fact that they were evolved by the people and managed by them for their own needs. All others including the state only encouraged them and acted as support mechanisms. And there are statistics to prove this point. In 1941, in the Chotanagpur and Santhal parganas of Bihar 12.5% land was under irrigation. It declined to 4.5 % in 1981. The cause could be easily traced. 104 irrigation projects worth a whopping Rs 900 crore were launched in the area during this period. A damning evidence of the futility of the dams-and canal approach.

What needs to be done: The report concludes that the only way to tackle the country’s spiraling water crisis is to give the communities the right to manage the water resources--using their traditional(largely local) systems of harvesting. Fiscal incentives must be offered to encourage them to sustain these age-old techniques. And bureaucrats must be completely excluded from this management process. Making water a nationally-managed resource has only aggravated the problem. Now let the local people- who actually use the water and thrive on it- take over.