ON THE FIFTH day, a small but determined spring of water rose from the bed of a well in Benda. “Water! Water!” the children shouted as they broke into a celebratory dance.
Benda is a village in Banda district of the Bundelkhand region, from where some of the most distressing images of drought and water scarcity have come.
To overcome the crisis, an administration-led, people-supported movement called ‘Bhujal Bachao, Payjal Badhao’ (save groundwater, increase drinking water) is attempting to revive traditional water reservoirs across the district’s 470 panchayats, of which Benda (in Tindwari block) is one.
“For the past 10 years, there was no water in the well,” Prem Kali Raidas, a 33-year-old resident of Benda, told THE WEEK. “When we cleaned it, the gods became happy.”
The mission in Banda focuses on better management of rainwater by digging, cleaning and de-silting ponds and wells that have traditionally stored water. The villagers also adopt simple measures such as digging contour trenches around wells and hand pumps to prevent runoffs.
District Magistrate Heera Lal said the idea came to him soon after he took charge last August. “A faulty hand pump that threatened to turn into a law and order problem set me thinking about how explosive the situation would become during summer,” he said.
The district administration called for support from non-governmental organisations, academics, experts, elected representatives, government departments and the community to tackle the challenge. Among the ideas put into action was ‘water budgeting’—a calculation of the total amount of water used by an individual in a day. Within this was woven the identification of simple means to reduce water usage. These are not novel ideas, but Banda’s uniqueness lay in putting them into common practice.
Community participation was ensured by holding ‘jal chaupals’ (literally, water meetings) on the beds of ponds that once held water perennially. Simple questions were asked. For example, “How many pipes did one hand pump require 10 years ago? How many pipes are required now?” The answer—nine pipes a decade ago (one pipe is 10-foot long) to 13 now. This led to bigger conversations about why groundwater was receding.
Different strands of the programme have since evolved and are spread across various departments. For example, the agriculture department’s project on building bunds around farms for holding rainwater now includes attempts to motivate better-off farmers into doing so without government support.
Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), at least one traditional water source per village is being readied for the monsoon and the community is being called upon to donate man-days to the task, instead of just working against payments.
“We want to see results, so we have stayed clear of any waterbodies that are controversial,” says Rajendra Prasad Mishra, the district’s MGNREGA in-charge. So far, work has been done on 325 of the district’s 2,489 ponds.
At the heart of the mission is the recreation of the traditional bond with water bodies. The district’s 7,201 wells, for instance, were once offered prayers after weddings and childbirth in recognition of their life-sustaining roles. With the advent of hand pumps, tube wells and taps, these rituals all but stopped.
But some of that bond is being reestablished. “I had never imagined that we could do something to change how we got water,” said Prem Kali. “For a dry well to have water again is like a miracle we have created.”
In Banda, as elsewhere, the crisis of water availability is not the outcome of a single cause. The state Directorate of Geology and Mining’s 2017 District Survey Report noted, “Diversion structures for irrigation, domestic, industrial water supply… [and] lack of regulation in groundwater extraction has led to groundwater table depletion… resulting (in) change in surface water dynamics during the lean season of the river.”
Banda’s rainfall figures bolster this observation. As per records from the district’s groundwater resources department, in 2013, the average rainfall was 1,143.1mm; it was 1,236.5mm in 2016. In the same years, the average depth at which groundwater was available in the district’s eight blocks climbed down from an average of 7.45m to 8.85m.
Though the success of Banda’s efforts will be measured over time, the mission offers possible lessons on water management in challenging circumstances. This is a district listed among India’s most backward under the Backward Regions Grant Fund. Yet, the first phase of its water conservation efforts has earned a Smart Cities India Award (in May 2019) for digging 2,605 contour trenches with a holding capacity of 3,930 kilo litres of water. In the event of a good monsoon, district estimates put the groundwater recharge capacity of these at 1.1 lakh kilo litres.
Said Piyush Mohan Srivastava, the block development officer of Tindwari, the block in which Benda lies, “Water in ponds and wells is available only for a couple of months after the monsoon. A large part is lost to evaporation as the rocky earth does not allow easy permeability. Changes in surface water levels will be known five to six months after the rains. Transformations in groundwater levels will take much longer.”
However, Banda’s mission is not without its trials, caste hierarchies included.
Malkhe Shriwas, the 45-year-old former headman of Kurseja village (Mahui panchayat) said, “When I built a rainwater harvesting structure on my terrace and attempted to connect it to the nearby well, people said they would not allow water from a low-caste family’s home to pollute a community resource.”
There are also murmurs that activities such as symbolic worship of water sources are mere photo opportunities for the administration. Moreover, as wells have fallen into disuse, those who traditionally cleaned them are no longer available.
Banda, however, continues to dig deeper.