KOCHI: Rajendra Singh, renowned as the Waterman of India and a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, has a solution for Kerala’s drinking water shortage woes – community-driven decentralised water management.
“Despite receiving an average annual rainfall of nearly 3,000mm, Kerala still faces a shortage of drinking water. Community-driven decentralised water management is the only solution. This means a small community residing in an area makes its own water policy to conserve water and utilise it efficiently. For instance, in Kochi, the decentralised system can be implemented ward-wise,” said the 65-year-old water conservationist and environmentalist from Alwar, Rajasthan, who visited Wayanad and Kochi before returning on Monday evening.
However, the founder of Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), which works to make villages self-reliant in drinking water, rued that despite the state being blessed with many natural resources like rivers, hills, rain, forests and valleys, the people of Kerala are not bothered on preserving the same.
Rajendra, who was also awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, also known as the Nobel Prize for water, in 2015, exhorted Keralites to initiate two-fold action before it was too late.
“Kerala really is a water-rich state compared to Rajasthan, which receives a mere 200 mm average annual rainfall. The people here should focus on two things -- conservation of water and developing the skill for efficient use of water,” he said.
Rajendra, who visited disaster-hit areas of Wayanad the other day, termed it a ‘man-made crisis’.
“It’s the result of destroying the balance of the ecosystem there. So many buildings were constructed in the ecologically-fragile region and they exceeded the carrying capacity of the soil and the mountain system,” he pointed out.
The Rajasthan success formula
Rajendra, who played a crucial role in rejuvenating 24 rivers in Rajasthan, recalled how he went about the task initially.
“I got involved with the local community. First, I learned from them, and then I intellectualised the issue and the solutions with them, chiefly to revise the traditional water harvesting systems such as constructing johads (earthen dams) and kunds (water tanks) in catchment areas. Then they started taking action, which enabled the rise in the water table, thus reviving rivers,” he said.
He started the initiative back in 1985 when he visited the parched areas of Gopalpura village in Alwar.
“I wanted to work in the local community. Then there were lots of cases of night blindness. I started providing them treatment and built a school after realising that they were uneducated. However, they said they wanted a solution to the shortage of drinking water. The words of an old farmer Mangu Meena still reverberate in my ear. ‘We don’t need medicine, we don’t need education. It’s water that we need.’ I dedicated my life to solving the drinking water shortage from then onwards,” said Rajendra, who is also an Ayurveda practitioner.