Interview with Rajendra Singh

Midnite Toker

The River Maker
<img src="http://www.indiamike.com/newsimages/rivermaker.jpg" width="170" height="170">

Rajendra Singh makes rivers flow in the desert. Using traditional methods, his organisation has rejuvenated land in India's driest area. Yet his belief in community ownership of natural resources has frequently brought him into conflict with the government. Recovering after being beaten up by an official in Uttar Pradesh, he talked to Padma Tata about his passion for water.

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.

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.

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.


(Interview was first published in New Scientist print edition.)

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tracyprier

Yet more proof that India needs to look to herself to solve her problems and stop trying to find answers in the west.

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Midnite Toker

Not only does India need to look to her own problems - Indian people need to look to - and take ownership of - their own problems.

As Rajendra Singh says in this interview, the battle for water will be the biggest battle in the future, and it will pitch corporate interests against the needs of the individual. Politicians will just try to feather their own nests in this struggle.

I don't think you can leave something as fundamental as water to political bickering.

maree

Interesting... thanks, Midnite Toker.

By the way, has anyone read that new book by Dominique Lapierre on the Bhopal disaster... I'm interested to hear opinions.

Alan D

A very revelant post MT, especially with a below average monsoon this year over many parts of India. Sinking boreholes does not solve the water shortage problem in the long run, it only depletes the water table so that the boreholes have to be sunk deeper and deeper every year at greater cost. This is a cost that many villagers can not afford. The truth is that India is living on borrowed water.

Hopefully the work of Rajendra Singh and others like him ( the late Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain at the centre for Science and Environment, an NGO based in Delhi) is beginning to have an effect on the thinking of both rural and urban Indians.

People like Rajendra Singh will inevitably be seen as a threat by some to their vested interests ( attempts on his life and a fractured skull) but the positive results he is achieving, I hope, will soon be recognised by villagers all over India.

For more info on water harvesting and other environmental issues this is the link for the Centre for Science and Environment.

www.cseindia.org

Midnite Toker

A good link that, Alan. Thanks!

abracax

The big joke is that the central government spends more on water projects than on almost anything else, but most of the money goes to megaprojects like Sardar Sarovar and the black hole of Bihar (more dams per capita than anyplace in human history, all of them total scams). There's even this great Rajiv Gandhi initiative that does the same things Singh is trying to do in Rajasthan in Madhya Pradesh, but it only succeeds because of Digvijay Singh's patronage. God save the Indian peasant from the most corrupt and vicious mafias on Earth: their own governments.

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archits

Tarun Bharat Sangh is transforming rural Rajasthan by awakening old memories!

The work of Tarun Bharat Sangh, and it's founder Rajendra Singh in the districts of Rajasthan can easily be over-simplified as water-shed management whereas, it is in fact a revolution in regenerating life and society in denuded and deserted lands.

It's a seemingly simple two-step programme. First, revive vegetation on barren hill slopes and second, build small water catchments in the valleys and the plains.

The revival course.

We will see in some detail, how it was done, a little later; but now a quick fast-forward to what happens down the time-line and how nature organises her rewards.

.... dead rivers begin to flow

.... agriculture becomes possible round the year

.... impoverished villagers, labouring in cities return, and families are re-united

.... wearying labour like fetching water, gives way to positive developmental work

.... with enough water and fodder, income from animal-husbandry begins to flow

.... nutrition levels rise and public health improves

.... wooded hills welcome back wildlife, that round off forests' whole-ness

.... people rid of insecurities, come together to address other issues of life, like education and local governance

.... awareness and confidence, enable micro-credit schemes that lower the cost of households and start small enterprises.

.... people with leisure, turn to crafts, reviving folk practices like herbal medicine and community welfare

.... when small communities like these succeed, the government itself wakes up and development becomes what it should be: ground-up, instead of top-down.

Utopia?

Well, it has happened in the space of 15 years in Rajasthan. Beginning from the small village of Bhikampura in Alwar district, the people-centred development model is spreading all over Rajasthan. Today you can see the river Arvari, dead for 40 years flow again . So too the rivers Ruparel, Jahjajwali and numerous other rivulets. You can drive through Alwar district and observe without effort, stark barren hills contrasting with those beginning to turn green. You begin to believe more hill slopes will be green too. You see a land where peace reigns. The contentment in the air is palpable.

Johad rediscovered.

How did it happen?

It all began with a young man called Rajendra Singh in 1985. A self-effacing man with nerves of steel. As he himself would want it, let us talk of his Tarun Bharat Sangh's [TBS] work first and then look at his personal story.

The first step was to identify water and fodder as the key to revival of rural life in the ravaged lands of Alwar. To make both available round the year, micro-structures to trap water had to be built and the denuded hills allowed to regenerate, unimpeded by animal browsing.

Tarun Bharat Sangh [TBS], discovered that only people's fullest co-operation can achieve these ends. No amount of money, government action or legislation can deliver results. Therefore the design, location and construction of each water harvesting structure is discussed endlessly by Gram Sabha's until a true consensus is reached. True consensus is measured as attained, when every member of the community agrees to contribute either money or labour towards the construction of a johad [ see picture 2], a check dam or a weir. In one village the consensus took 5 years to arrive at. To the modern mind, that may seem too long for a piece of civil works, that then took only about 6 months to build. But, once such consensus-works are built, they become 'everyone's', are guarded and maintained. Issues of use and sharing, have been settled before construction began rather than later. Such works are forever and the 5 years of deliberation recedes into insignificance.

Rules for the hills.

Again, regeneration of hills needs everyone's involvement. Hills revive when left alone by man cutting off mature trees, and cattle nibbling at sprouting stumps. TBS guides villagers in the chosen hill areas through hundreds of hours of meetings over several months until they all agree to not let browsing by

.... cows for 3 years

.... goats for 5 years and

.... camels for 7 years.

This agreement leads to what TBS calls 'social fencing' which, in contrast with physical fences, is virtual; only in the mind. With great fanfare , elders lead villagers on a walk through the entire line of the agreed 'social fence', sanctify it by sprinkling a mixture of sacred waters and milk. Once thus notified, TBS has found that villagers respect it and police it! Can government funds and fiats ever achieve this?

Talk, talk, talk.

TBS's 'people-centred' approach to development is

.... endless discussions on every conceivable issue

.... arrival at a consensus, however long it takes

.... involvement of villagers with labour, service, money or material

.... keeping the government at bay, with defiance if needs be

.... and finally, low down the list, balance fund raising and actual execution of the works.

This was not a received wisdom that Rajendra Singh has handed down. He put the rules together as he worked over the years, close to the people. In 1985, as a newly married 28 year old he was well-settled, with a government job in Jaipur. But the ghosts of Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan haunted him goading him into 'doing something'. Not unlike the Buddha he walked out on his wife and home and was inaccessible for two years. Along with 4 of his friends, he arrived at the village of Kishori and said to the bewildered villagers, that he wanted to 'do something'. They were puzzled, intrigued or wary.

Accident had chosen the place well for him. In the thirties, the district of Alwar in the green valleys of the Aravalli hills was a prosperous land. But a greedy prince, with an eye cocked on a free India that would take away his primacy, sold off the rights to the timber on the hills. In ten swift years, contractors laid the land low. Rains brought down loads of earth from naked hills that filled catchment works. Water sped off without stopping to feed the wells and fields. Often they hurtled into deep marble mines and lay uselessly there. Land owners joined landless labourers on a trek to Delhi and Agra to toil for small sums to send home. Families broke up.

For forty years , a whole new generation did not know that there had been hope and fertility once around them.

A hard model to follow.

A few like Mangu Ram remembered the old ways. He led Rajendra Singh and his friends to a place where they began to dig. It was the first johad in forty years. A johad is a dug-out pond, created at a place chosen with native wisdom, informed by remembered patterns of water flow during the rains. After the rains, water stays in for months and recharges the wells nearby. The success of the first johad switched on the collective memory of the people. And enthusiastic construction began all around, guided by elders. When the 650th johad was dug out, close to the forgotten river bed of the Arvari, the river 'woke up' at the next rains and began to run! And done so, round the year for two years now. At Hamirpura [ see pictures] it is a broad river supporting year-round agriculture on it's banks. Today all over Rajasthan the TBS model pioneered by Rajendra Singh, is spreading. There are 3500 'people-made' water conservation structures. Villagers contribute one third the cost of all construction. TBS organises the rest. Government at last, has stopped being a hindrance and begun to be a facilitator. President Narayanan, flew down to Hamirpur to pay tribute to the villagers.

It is nothing but humbling to see the transformation brought about by unlettered men who rallied around an unsophisticated young man, who preaches that 'mountains are nature's breasts and river waters, the milk.'

Midnite Toker

"in ten swift years..."
It was swift and easy to wreck the water systems, it will take rather longer to repair them.
Fortunately for Rajasthan, they have an excellent development model in Tarun Bharat Sangh's examples.

Thanks for the historical perspective, archits.

indiansitar

He has now become a part of www.jalbhagirathi.com.

Teaming up with a local maharajah.