India, Enlightened

(Page 2 of 5)

UNDER THE DESERT SUN

The Ganga Ahvaan campaign was launched in an unlikely place: the former palace of Maharaja Gaj Singh Ji of Marwar-Jodhpur, on the edge of the Thar Desert in western Rajasthan, India's most drought-stricken state. It is also the largest, with 56 million people in an area slightly larger than New Mexico. If India ever realizes its ambition of building affordable, large-scale solar power installations, this will be one of the prime locations.

The palace, a sprawling sandstone complex a few miles outside the ancient city of Jodhpur, is home to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation. An odd name, I remarked to its director, Kanupriya Harish, considering that we were out in the desert, that jal means water, and that the Bhagirathi River is hundreds of miles away in the Himalayas.

Not really, she said with a smile, because the word Bhagirathi also has another significance. In Hindu legend, a king named Bhagirath had to do penance for several centuries so that the goddess Ganga would forgive the sins of his ancestors. Finally she granted his wish and decided to come down to earth, taking the form of a great river.

"Anything that is very hard to do is called Bhagirath prayah," Harish explained. "A very difficult task. And since there is nothing harder than to find water in the desert, that is how we got our name."

Finding enough water is a problem in most of India, and it's getting harder all the time. In theory there should be enough for everyone, since the overall precipitation levels are tremendous. But most of the rain falls in the three-month monsoon season, and in recent years it has been more and more concentrated into a small number of intense downpours. In a single 24-hour period in 2005, for instance, Mumbai got 39 inches of rain. But if the water isn't captured in a timely fashion, it's lost, and India contrives to lose it in myriad ways, including profligate irrigation, degraded infrastructure, and a failure to treat and reuse wastewater. Rajasthan isn't Mumbai, of course; much of the Thar Desert gets only about four inches of rain a year. But the same weather patterns are apparent, Harish said. If the meager rainfall is spread out over several weeks, people can get by, more or less, scratching out a bare subsistence by cultivating lentils, millet, and a poor variety of sesame seeds. However, such rain as there is in the Thar comes more often now in a single, violent burst. "Most of the work we're doing now is actually an adaptive strategy to climate change," Harish said.

In Delhi, Ramaswamy Iyer, a former government official who drafted India's first national water plan in 1987, had told me he saw three basic options for dealing with the water crisis. You can increase the supply by massive engineering projects -- dams, canals, the interlinking of major river systems. You can leave it to the market to supply and price water as it would any other commodity. Or you can treat water as a community resource, making decisions at the local level and educating people about conservation. The Indian government has relied heavily on the first two strategies; Kanupriya Harish favors the third.

In earlier times, she said, people in the Thar developed all sorts of creative techniques for harvesting and conserving water. But the collective memory of these skills began to dissipate after independence, when the expectation grew (though it was often ill-founded) that the government would come in, lay a pipe, and solve the problem. The critique of government was a thread that ran through almost every conversation I had in India: no matter how grand various schemes might look on paper, most were beset by bureaucratic inertia, crippling inefficiencies, and a culture of corruption that allowed budgeted funds to drain away into private pockets like water into the desert sands.

Local people could act with much greater agility, Harish said, and communities could develop entrepreneurial skills along the way. The trick was to revive the old, forgotten techniques and combine them with the smartest of the new technologies. She snapped open her laptop and launched into a brisk PowerPoint presentation to show me the spectrum of possibilities. At one end, a woman dug a hole in the sand to collect seepage. At the other, an improbable high-tech structure, shaped like a pyramid, offered a way to harvest Rajasthan's scarcest resource -- water -- by using its most abundant -- the desert sun.

That sun beat down mercilessly all the next day. It was still winter, and by the standards of the Thar it was not especially hot -- 95 degrees or so. We drove west through a landscape of rolling dunes and spiny scrub, innumerable camel carts, wild peacocks scurrying across the baking sand. Along the way we saw many of the water-harvesting structures Harish had described in her PowerPoint. There were beris and tankas and talabs -- shallow and deep wells, ground-level and rooftop storage tanks, ponds large and small. Women walked away from a water hole with heavy pitchers on their heads, climbing uphill through a grove of thorny khejri trees. Harish told me that these are still zealously protected by members of the local Bishnoi caste -- the original tree-huggers, who sacrificed their lives in a massacre in 1730 rather than allow the khejri to be cut down by the local maharaja.

As we drew closer to the border with Pakistan, the land was dotted with white salt flats, left behind by the evaporation of last year's monsoons. At one point a man in camouflage fatigues waved us off the one-lane road and ordered us to loop around across the salt flats. For hundreds of yards ahead the roadway was occupied by a long column of battle tanks.

I asked my taciturn driver if he thought India and Pakistan would go to war.

"Inevitable," he grunted, seeming almost to relish the idea.

In the village of Trisingadi Sodha, members of the local water-users' association, the jal sabha -- village elders with gold earrings and brilliant turbans of red, white, yellow, and purple -- garlanded us with oleanders and daubed our foreheads with vermilion. We walked with them to a large pond, perhaps a hundred yards across, which collected rain that was channeled from a jagged line of sandstone hills five miles away. The pond held enough water year-round for 10,000 people. One of the men pointed out a flock of migratory Siberian cranes poking around in the muddy shallows on the far side. Later, as we sipped sweet masala chai, the elders brought out their records for inspection -- dog-eared notebooks with minutes and decisions from their monthly meetings, signed in neat Hindi script or with thumbprints, careful entries of money spent and received. Some of the jal sabhas charged monthly fees to water users, Harish said. Others sold it by the tanker-full. This income financed the necessary maintenance, with each village devising its own system -- posting a guard by the pond, for example, to keep away would-be defecators, or perhaps training a young man to keep the pumps and filters in good working order.

"It's a challenge to get the women involved," Harish said. "This is still a very feudal area."

"But what about you?" I asked.

She twinkled. "For most of these communities I've ceased to be a woman. They think that I'm a man."

Something significant was happening here, it seemed to me. The jal sabha was blending traditional principles of community organization with a newer entrepreneurial spirit. In the process, India might ease some of the historic tension between village and city. Gandhi believed that the village was India's beating heart; Nehru, the first prime minister after independence, thought its future lay in the cities. Here was a way to maintain the integrity of the village while building the modest, incremental prosperity that might make it unnecessary for people to migrate to places like the slums of Okhla.

This was not the only way in which Gandhi's vision was being updated. Forty miles to the south, in the straggling village of Roopji Raja Beri, a surreal sight confronted us. I recognized the flattened foil dome, which somewhat resembled a silvery mushroom cap, from Harish's PowerPoint slide. It looked as if an alien spacecraft had set down among the sand dunes, but it was a "water pyramid," only the second of its kind in India. The technology was Dutch; a team of engineers had come here for six weeks to install it, and the inauguration ceremony had taken place just five days earlier.

The entrepreneur in charge was an imposing, barrel-chested villager named Prem Ram, a 20-year veteran of the Indian army. He said that the water shortage in Roopji Raja Beri had grown so severe that people had come to blows. The groundwater was so salty that you could literally burn your tongue, and there had not been a decent rain since 2003. "The natural order is breaking," he said.

Prem Ram seemed as proud of his pyramid as he was of his military service. He opened a vent for me to look inside, but a fierce surge of heat and humidity drove me back before I could catch more than a glimpse of the glittering pool of freshwater. The strange structure used the power of the sun to function as a combined distillation and desalination plant, he explained. And since it ran entirely on solar energy, the operating costs were close to zero. The brackish groundwater was pumped in from a nearby holding tank; once inside the pyramid, it was distilled through evaporation. He thumped a meaty fist on one of the sloping sides, and shimmering streaks of freshwater ran down the interior walls. The salt that was left behind provided an added source of income for the villagers, who subsisted otherwise by selling the milk from their scrawny herds of cattle, goats, and water buffalo.

One day, if the costs of the technology come down, if the government bureaucracy becomes more efficient, if the high-tech entrepreneurs from Hyderabad and Bangalore put up the start-up capital, there may be other strange sights here in the Thar Desert: gigantic solar farms, perhaps, each one capable of feeding as much power into the national grid as all the new dams on the Ganga. But it will be equally important for India to think small and local, and to focus on the entrepreneurial village culture that is emerging in obscure places like Trisingadi Sodha and Roopji Raja Beri. To Americans, living off the grid may imply a hair-shirt lifestyle choice, a yurt among the Oregon redwoods. To Indians, paradoxically, it may be a pathway to the national mainstream.

Continued...