How Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) has revived the tradition of Johad
On the night of October 2, 1985, when I got down at the last stop of the bus at Bheekampura with four of my friends, we only had a single agenda, which was ‘to fight injustice against the people’. And we only knew one way to do it, by spreading literacy in the villages. So we promptly started a literacy drive.
But the people were suffering from a severe scarcity of water. The region that once sustained the eco-system of the ‘Aravalli’ had become barren.
It was difficult to find young people in the villages, all of them had fled in search of employment, women trudged long distances to fetch a mere pot full of water. Crops failed regularly, lack of vegetation led to soil degradation; monsoon run-off washed away the topsoil. I remember there was not a single blade of grass in the region and we often stumbled on the carcass of cattle. Barely three per cent of cultivable area was irrigated. Life was difficult and hardship endless.
One day, Mangu Patel, the wise old man of this village told me, “we do not want your literacy, we want water”. But where was the water? I did not know anything about water.
Mangu explained to me about the rich tradition existing in this region of building Johads, which were a prime example of the ingenuity of inexpensive simple traditional technology that was quite remarkable in terms of recharging groundwater of the entire region. Johads are simple mud and concave shaped barriers built across the slope to arrest the rainwater run-off with a high embankment on three sides while the fourth side is left open for the water to enter.
The height of the embankment is such that the capacity of the Johad is more than the volume of run-off coming from the catchment based on a rough estimation of maximum possible run-off that could come into it. Therefore the height varies from one Johad to another, depending on the site, water flow and pressure, etc. In some cases to ease the water pressure a masonry structure called Afra is also made for the outlet of excess water. The water storage area varies from 2 hectares to a maximum of 100 hectares.
Water collected in a Johad during monsoon penetrates into the sub-soil. This recharges the groundwater and improves the soil moisture in vast areas, mostly down stream. The groundwater can be drawn from traditional open wells, built and maintained by the villagers themselves without any input from outside. As the percolation process takes sometime, depending on the soil, depth of water etc. during this temporary period (sometimes several months), the water in the Johad is directly used for irrigation, drinking of animals, and other domestic purposes. The advantages of this structure is that apart from arresting and storing rainwater, it checks the soil erosion, mitigates the floods, and ensures water availability in wells even for several successive drought years, like we had here in the last 5 years. Also, during the dry season when the water gradually recedes in the Johad, the land inside the Johad itself becomes available for cultivation. This land receives periodically good silt and moisture, and that allows growing crops without any irrigation. So the Johad does not take away valuable arable land from cultivation. The distinctiveness of this structure is that it is based on simple and cheap technology with locally available resources, mostly labour and soil, and sometimes when necessary, stones, sand and lime, all locally available. All the estimations are based on the villagers experience and intuition, without any physical measurements.
When I went to Bheekampura in 1985, this unique traditional water management system was still alive in the collective memory of the people remained alienated from the global environment.
On the advice by Mangu Patel, we started building Johads. The local authorities were dead against us as we by-passed all bureaucratic channels and dealt with the people and they directly to fulfill their requirements in the manner they decided.
The first Johad got completed in three years, in the fourth year we built 50 Johads, in the fifth we built almost 100. In 2001 we built around 1,000 water structures and in total we have built nearly 9,000 water harvesting structures in more than 1,000 villages. When we had started working, our area was classified by the government as ‘dark zone’, it means with severe water shortage and the water level had receded to difficult depths. The same area after 10 years was classified as ‘white zone’, which means underground water level are satisfactory and it does not need attention from the government.
No engineer was called for consultation; we were guided entirely by the traditional wisdom of the people who have maintained the ecological balance for generations. These water structures were built with the active participation of the community in its construction from identification of the site to the designing of the structure and by contribution in the cost of its construction and latter in its maintenance, which ensured that all the structures were need based.
As a result, water became abundant; more water meant better crops, better conditions of soil, time for the girls to go to schools, and rich community life. It helped forestation in the area and development of wildlife.
Prosperity returned back to the region, agriculture became productive and due to availability of fodder cattle rearing started, resulting in increased production of milk. Higher water levels also meant less money on the diesel for pump set.
The rebirth of Aravari River
From 1985 onwards we have been helping people to build Johads. These Johads are traditional earthen dams. These small scales, low cost structures do not look like very much, but taken together in hundreds and thousands they have changed the face of our part of India (Rajasthan). TBS has helped people to build more than 9,000 Johads, Check Dams, and Anicuts for harvesting the rainwater. In 1996 we were amazed to find Aravari River flowing even at the peak of summer.
Since then four more rivers, Sarsa, Ruparel, Bhagani and Jahajwali have become perennial.
When there was plenty of water in Aravari, there was natural growth of fish, which went on multiplying. Seeing that the government wanted to get hold of fish and brought in a contractor, the people resisted and the Government had to cancel the contract. It is not that the local people wanted control over the fish. Far from it. They are all vegetarians and do not eat fish, but they realised that today, it was fish tomorrow it would be water.
Since 1940s the Aravari River had been degraded to a mere monsoon drain, witnessing only brief and strong flows of muddy water. We had been building these structures over the years without realising that we were in fact recharging the river through percolation underground. Now the water is clear and shows gently throughout the year.
(The writer is winner of 2001 Roman Magsaysay Award and has widely been appreciated and recognised for rain water harvesting. He can be contacted at [email protected])
Comments